SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A Chilean judge on Saturday ordered a volunteer firefighter and a former forestry official detained for allegedly planning and causing a mammoth forest fire in the Valparaiso region that caused 137 deaths and made 16,000 people homeless in February.
The court in Valparaiso ruled the two men, who were arrested Friday, could be held for 180 days while they are investigated.
The chief prosecutor in the case, Osvaldo Ossandón, told journalists that the main suspect is Francisco Mondaca, a 22-year-old volunteer firefighter in Valparaiso who is accused of physically starting the fire. He said flares and fireworks were found in Mondaca's vehicle.
The other suspect was identified as Franco Pinto, a former employee of the National Forest Corporation. He is accused of planning the crime.
The regional prosecutor for Valparaiso, Claudia Perivancich, said investigators have evidence the two men agreed “in advance to carry out conduct of this type when the weather conditions were adequate.”
Prosecutors said that according to Mondaca's testimony, there was an economic motive behind the plot — providing more work in fighting fires. They said they had not ruled out the possibility of more people being involved.
The commander of the Valparaiso Fire Department, Vicente Maggiolo, said, “We are very dismayed by the situation."
Maggiolo called it an isolated incident and said it should not tarnish the work of the fire department. “We have been saving lives for more than 170 years,” he told TVN.
Christian Little, executive director of the forestry department, described the detention of a former official as “a pain” for the agency.
Both the fire department and forestry agency said they would tighten hiring procedures.
The megafire began Feb. 2 in the Lago Peñuelas nature reserve, in the central region of Chile, and for several days burned several communes, including destroying more than 10,000 homes. It is considered Chile's worst tragedy since a magnitude 8.8 earthquake killed more than 500 people on Feb. 27, 2010.
FILE - A resident flees an encroaching forest fire in Vina del Mar, Chile, Feb. 3, 2024. Police arrested a suspect on Friday, May 24, 2024, for allegedly causing the forest fire that left 137 dead and injured some 16,000 people in the Valparaíso region. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix, File)
MOSCOW (AP) — The espionage trial in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will begin on June 26 and will be held behind closed doors, a statement from the court that will hear the case said Monday.
Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.
The trial is to be held in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.
The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.
Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.
The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.
Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.
“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”
The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich's release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.
Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.
Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.
Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.
Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”
“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.
Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.
The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”
The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26
The trial of a US reporter charged with espionage in Russia is to begin June 26
FILE - Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Appeals Court of General Jurisdiction in Moscow, Russia, April 23, 2024. Gershkovich, who has been jailed for over a year in Russia on espionage charges, will stand trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said Thursday June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)
