Chile’s Investigative Police (PDI) arrested firefighter Elías Antonio Salazar on Monday (9), suspected of participating in a scheme to cause large forest fires in the Valparaíso region in February. The tragedy, one of the largest of its kind in Chilean history, caused 137 deaths and affected more than 16,000 people.
According to information from the newspaper El País, Salazar was technical manager of the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (Senapred), from which he was dismissed after his arrest.
He is the third suspect arrested in the case. In May, volunteer firefighter Francisco Ignacio Mondaca and Franco Pinto, a firefighter with the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF), an institution linked to the Ministry of Agriculture, were already detained.
Guillermo Gálvez, chief inspector of the PDI in Valparaíso, reported that Salazar would have participated in the scheme to generate the fires because “he likes to participate and be a ‘hero’, helping when emergencies occur.”
Pinto, one of those arrested in May and who remains in preventive detention, was identified by the Public Ministry as the mastermind behind the fires and was allegedly motivated by the payment of overtime.
According to El País, he allegedly told Mondaca that the fires had “stopped” earlier this year in Chile, which led to the plan to start the blazes. The three suspects exchanged messages and phone calls before the fires, prosecutors said.
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