Young people allegedly started the fire, but claim innocence
Two 22-year-old university students have been charged with a forest fire in the Como region of Italy and have been fined 13,5 million euros (around R$59,3 million).
The young people were having a barbecue in a house in the middle of the forest, belonging to the grandparents of one of them, when the fire started. One of them even told the Italian press, according to the BBC, that they were serving as “scapegoats” for the incident for which they were convicted.
Prosecutors analyzed the path of the fire to the property where the young people were and determined that it had been started by embers from the barbecue, linked to the dry conditions of the place. The two young people and the property owner were considered co-responsible
“[We are] deeply sad,” one of the students told Italian newspaper La Stampa. “We are the real victims of this story.”
“[We] immediately alerted the fire brigade and threw ourselves into the flames to try to put them out,” they said.
The fire started on December 30, 2018 and lasted several days, destroying around a thousand hectares of forest.
To determine the amount that students should pay, a formula was used: the newspaper La Stampa reported that the regulation requires a fine of 118 to 593 euros (R$518 to R$2.600) per square meter. The damage that the two young people caused was estimated at around 6.840 square meters, which would result in a fine of between 8 million and 40 million euros (R$35,1 million to R$175,7 million).
“What is the point of imposing an administrative sanction, knowing that the two boys, still students, cannot pay it?” asked the lawyer for one of the students to the newspaper.
The prosecutor in the case claims, to the local newspaper Il Giorno Como, that this is a fine that serves as “a sign that we need to pressure people towards greater responsibility in protecting the environment”.
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