A 35-year-old housekeeper was arrested in Greece on Tuesday in connection with devastating wildfires that tore across the island of Chios this week, officials said.
“She’d been smoking,” Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, the spokesman of the Hellenic Fire Service said of the housekeeper, who he said was a Georgian woman.
Five blazes, the first of which broke out on Sunday, collectively consumed more than 11,000 acres of the island.
A news release from the fire service said a foreign woman had been arrested on the north of the island, near where the last of the fires sprang up on Monday.
The blazes razed huge swaths of the island’s forestland, forcing the evacuation of more than a dozen villages. Firefighters from across the country were rushed to the island on planes and ferries to battle the blaze; more than 400 were eventually deployed.
As Greece approaches its summer wildfire season, the Chios fire was a reminder of a grim reality for the nation, where furious wildfires have become a regular part of life, especially as climate change has made the country hotter and drier.
Chios is one of the largest islands in the Aegean Sea, known for resin-producing mastic trees which hardly grow anywhere else in the world. Used for things like pharmaceuticals, beauty products and liquor, the trees are a critical driver for the local economy, and a draw for tourists. While not as popular as some other Greek islands, Chios sees an influx of visitors during the summer months, also the height of wildfire season.
The trees have been periodically threatened by wildfires on the island, including in 2012, when a wildfire destroyed more than half of the island’s mastic tree population, causing a global shortage of the valuable resin.
The fires this week damaged some of the island’s trees, according to local media, but did not burn the southern part of the island, where the majority of the mastic trees grow. Three of the blazes started on Sunday; another two began on Monday amid sweltering, windy conditions. Firefighters had contained most of the fires by Thursday, as winds calmed.
Soon after the fires began spreading on Sunday, fire officials deployed investigators from the fire service’s Directorate for Combating Arson Crimes. The scope of the fires, and their presence in multiple, unconnected areas of the island, suggested to officials that they did not begin naturally.
“We will not hide behind words: When fires break out simultaneously in such scattered locations, we must speak of suspicious activity,” said Giannis Kefalogiannis, the country’s Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, in a Greek-language statement on Monday.
Niki Kitsantonis and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in London.
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