The Loures Court decided today to impose pre-trial detention on a man suspected of setting several fires in the Montejunto mountain range, in the municipalities of Cadaval and Alenquer (Lisbon), police sources said.
The suspect, 31, will await trial in pre-trial detention, after having been questioned by the police for the first time and having had the coercive measures applied to him, police sources told the Lusa news agency.
The man, who has no criminal record, was arrested this week by the Judicial Police (PJ), and his arrest was announced on Wednesday.
At the time, it was explained in a statement that the suspect used “artifacts designed to delay ignition, [and] set several fires”.
After the press release, the director of PJ’s Lisbon and Tagus Valley Directorate, João Oliveira, said that the suspect, who had been “under investigation for several months”, had been arrested in flagrante delicto.
The man, he added, is linked to the construction sector, acted without any economic interests and only for “futile reasons”, which he called “mythomania”.
The PJ has not yet determined the exact number of fires that the suspect set, but they all occurred “in a forest area bordering an urban area” and “would have reached more serious proportions if the firefighting forces had not intervened quickly”.
“The suspect’s actions endangered the physical integrity and lives of people, caused significant environmental risks, as well as causing high costs in the use of means and resources to fight the various fires and suppress the ignitions,” the note reads.
The investigation, carried out in coordination between the two police forces, was supported by the Ignition Reduction Working Group (a structure made up of the PJ, GNR and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests), the Nature and Environment Protection Service and the Scientific Police Laboratory.
In the last two months, the Montejunto mountain range has been devastated by several fires, one of which occurred on the 3rd, in the town of Póvoa, in the parishes of Cadaval and Pero Moniz, and which mobilized 146 operatives, 44 vehicles and six aircraft.
On July 12, another fire broke out in Espinheira, also in the municipality of Cadaval, and was only contained after nine hours of fighting, involving more than half a thousand firefighters, a hundred and fifty vehicles and 13 aircraft.
The two fires burned around 402 hectares, Carlos Silva, the sub-regional commander for the West, told Lusa at the time.
The Serra do Montejunto, in the municipalities of Alenquer and Cadaval, councils in the Lisbon district that share the leadership of the protected landscape commission with the ICNF, was classified as a regional protected landscape in 1999, with the aims of conserving and enhancing the landscape and natural heritage and promoting tourism there.
The highest point in the western region, it rises to 666 meters above sea level and covers an area of almost 5,000 hectares, home to 400 species of plants and 75 different species of birds.
