{"id":56768,"date":"2026-07-16T12:55:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T12:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/volunteer-firefighter-suspected-of-starting-devastating-france-forest-fire\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T12:55:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T12:55:54","slug":"volunteer-firefighter-suspected-of-starting-devastating-france-forest-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/volunteer-firefighter-suspected-of-starting-devastating-france-forest-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteer firefighter suspected of starting devastating France forest fire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Prosecutor Diane Ngomsik told AFP news agency that the volunteer firefighter, 18, had initially confessed to &#8220;setting fire to twigs with a lighter and petrol&#8221; before retracting it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">BFMTV said a second 18-year old man had also been placed under formal investigation &#8211; a stage in French criminal procedure which may lead to formal charges and a subsequent trial.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Fontainebleau forest blaze partially closed the country&#8217;s main north-south motorway since it started last Sunday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">President Macron said 10% of the forest had been burned, and hailed the fact that there had been no victims so far.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The forest is home to the Palace and Park of Fontainebleau, a Unesco World Heritage site since 1981.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">France has registered nearly 11,000 fires since the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/ce97zd8yx1xo?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prosecutor Diane Ngomsik told AFP news agency that the volunteer firefighter, 18, had initially confessed to &#8220;setting fire to twigs with a lighter and petrol&#8221; before retracting it. BFMTV said a second 18-year old man had also been placed under formal investigation &#8211; a stage in French criminal procedure which may lead to formal charges [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56768"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56770,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56768\/revisions\/56770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}