Fatal fire by firefighters in Bordeaux: a minor indicted

A minor was indicted as part of the investigation into the origin of the fire which caused the death of two firefighters in July near Bordeaux airport, in Mérignac (Gironde), according to a source close to the case cited by AFP. The teenager admitted to having thrown a cigarette butt at the place where the fire started, the prosecution said on Friday. The 15-year-old was indicted for “unintentional destruction by fire (...) causing the death of others,” said the public prosecutor in Bordeaux, Renaud Gaudeul, in a press release.

Arrested and placed in police custody on Tuesday, two brothers, occupants of a vehicle which had been seen in the “immediate vicinity” of the fire, admitted their presence on July 21 at that location, according to the magistrate. The older brother, an adult, is “at this stage out of the blame”, affirmed the prosecutor, specifying that the minor admitted to having “smoked a cigarette, subsequently thrown away”, and estimated “that he could be at the origin of the disaster, without certainty”. The teenager was placed in a closed educational center, “following his first appearance interrogation,” added Renaud Gaudeul.

On July 21, the truck where the two firefighters were located was “trapped” by the flames according to the director of the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) of Gironde. Wilfried Schmitter and Anthony Berthôme, two professional fire brigade warrant officers aged 34, were cited last week in the Order of the Nation, a title of recognition created in 1917 to reward “exceptional services or acts of dedication accomplished for France at the risk of one's life, in a civil or military capacity”.

In France, the year 2026, marked by repeated heat waves favored by climate change, is already breaking the record for burned areas in twenty years of satellite measurements, according to the European fire monitoring system (Effis), which lists nearly 100,000 hectares already burned. The Gironde megafire, which broke out the day after the death of the two firefighters at Bordeaux airport, covered more than 40,000 hectares alone, according to authorities' estimates. Friday, while a large majority of the metropolitan area was on heatwave orange alert, firefighters were still fighting a major fire in the neighboring department of Landes which has already covered 1,100 hectares since Thursday.