An arsonist, an ex-military man with alleged links to an illegal organisation and psychiatric problems, was arrested in the last hours after being caught with several containers of gasoline near the main forest fires unleashed in recent days in the province of Bursa, in northwestern Turkey, amid a terrible wave of fires – driven by drought and high temperatures – that has left a trail of destruction and at least 17 dead in the last month.
According to the Turkish NTV channel website, the suspect, a 30-year-old man identified as Ufuk Aytekin, was arrested late on 27 July after local residents spotted him with a container full of petrol in his vehicle in a forest area around Harmancık, a district south of Bursa where a wildfire had broken out the previous day, and which firefighting crews are still today struggling to control. Subsequently, his charred mobile phone was also located in the area of the forest fire.
Following this evidence, several residents of the nearby village of Ballısaray who saw Aytekin attempted to lynch him, although police were able to intervene in time to prevent this and took him to the district police station to make a statement. In his initial confession , Aytekin reportedly admitted to buying several canisters of petrol at a local petrol station and then going to a nearby forest and setting fire to several trees: “They threw me out of house. I wanted to be locked up for life. For a moment, I gave in to the temptations of the devil and set fire to the forest,” he told police, adding that he had suffered burns to his hands and feet during the action.
The detainee had reportedly been suffering from mental problems for years for which he had been taking medication, which he said he had recently stopped taking. The investigation into his past revealed that, after graduating in 2015 from the Professional Air Force NCO School, he served as an air sergeant until 2019, when he faced prosecution for his alleged links to FETÖ, the illegal organisation accused of organising the 2016 failed coup in Turkey.
During the trial, however, he cooperated with justice and became an informant, for which he received a suspended sentence of only one and a half years in prison, although he would eventually be expelled from the army in 2021. From then on he led an erratic life, being fired from several jobs, while his family described him as an aggressive person with psychological problems who created constant conflicts, that eventually led to his family kicking him out of the house. Also, several recent complaints were filed against him with to local authorities.
Security cameras recorded him buying petrol
CCTV footage from a local petrol station recorded him arriving at the site in his pickup, where he bought two 5-litre bottles of water , emptied them into flower pots and filled them with petrol, put them in the back of his vehicule and then left the petrol station. The added circumstance is that he had previously been working at this petrol station for 6 or 7 months, and then went to work on a construction site.
Turkish Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç confirmed the arrest of the suspect, adding that a total of 21 people have been arrested in the last month for their possible involvement in the wildfires in Turkey. Investigators are now examining his mobile phone records and establishing his movements over the past few days through CCTV footage and plate recognition technology to determine whether this arsonist is linked to other forest fires that have occurred in recent days in Bursa or other provinces; however the detainee – now already in prison awaiting trial – has denied any links to other wildfires or acting on behalf of any organisation.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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