A civil protection official told AFP that all of the fires that ravaged urban and rural areas in northeastern Algeria on Wednesday and Thursday and killed at least 38 people have been extinguished.
According to Algerian Civil Protection Colonel Farouk Achour, all of the fires have been entirely put out.
In El Tarf, close to the Tunisian border, the preliminary death toll has increased to 37, including 11 children and six women.
However, a number of media outlets reported the passing of a different victim, a 72-year-old Guelma man (east).
Twenty forest fires were put out over the course of the last 48 hours with the help of more than 1,700 firefighters; 200 people were hurt, including those who suffered severe burns.
To find out if some of the flames that broke out were intentionally set, the Ministry of Justice has, for its part, started an investigation.
The prosecutors’ office in Souk Ahras, where a family of six perished in a fire and was buried on Thursday, reported the capture of a vandal in a nearby forest. A hospital located in a forested area was evacuated, and more than 350 families were pushed from their homes.
In addition, the gendarmerie detained four males close to El Tarf on suspicion of torching their neighbours’ agricultural crops, though it was unclear from the authorities whether these fires were to blame for the terrible blazes that have engulfed the state for the past two days.
The paucity of firefighting planes during the most recent fires has led to harsh criticism of the authorities.
Additionally, experts argued for greater measures to boost Africa’s largest nation’s capabilities for combating fires due to its more than four million hectares of forested land.
Since the beginning of August, some 150 fires have broken out throughout Algeria, ravaging hundreds of hectares of forest and woodland.
Every summer, forest fires rage in the countrys north, but this phenomenon is exacerbated year after year by climate change, which increases drought and heat waves.
More than 90 people died in forest fires that ravaged the country’s north, destroying more than 100,000 hectares of forest, making the summer of 2021 the worst in contemporary Algerian history.
It resulted in numerous deaths. putting out the fires in Algeria
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