A 40-year-old man arrested on Sunday for having started two fires in a forest in Anglet, on the Basque coast (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), was hospitalized in a psychiatric department on Monday evening, at the Pellegrin hospital in Bordeaux, said the Bayonne prosecutor’s office on Tuesday.
“The investigation is suspended for the time of his hospitalization, we cannot hear him at this stage”, explained the deputy public prosecutor of Bayonne, Marc Bride. The police had been alerted by passers-by who saw the suspicious behavior of the man, early Sunday afternoon, on the edge of the Chiberta forest, in Anglet.
He had attacked a bus driver a few days earlier
The man was already known to the police for having assaulted a bus driver a few days earlier, on the night of August 7 to 8, in Biarritz, according to the prosecution. “He had been interned before being released on Friday because his condition was not considered to be of concern by the doctors”, indicated this Tuesday the mayor of Anglet, Claude Olive. The man, with a clean criminal record, is summoned before the Bayonne court by the end of the year, to answer for this attack, according to the Bayonne prosecutor’s office.
On Sunday, the mayor of Anglet had issued an order to decide on the automatic internment of the arsonist, but for lack of space at the Bayonne hospital, the man had been kept in a cell, “even though his condition was not compatible at all,” notes the mayor. He spent two days in police custody before being transferred Monday evening to the Pellegrin hospital in Bordeaux.
A first fire of arson in July
On July 30, 2020, a fire of criminal origin, for which a teenager is indicted, had ravaged 167 hectares of this same forest, in Anglet. Five houses were destroyed in the fire, which caused no casualties.
In the current context of drought, the mayor of Anglet had issued an order prohibiting access to the forest estate on August 8, lifted on the Sunday morning of the events.