The fire service and Omodos mukhtar Evgenios Michael were at loggerheads on Saturday over the cause of the wildfire which broke out near the village on Friday.

Fire service spokesman Andreas Kettis had said early in the day said the fire had been caused by a pile of rubbish which had been left by the side of a road, but this was denied by Michael later in the day.

“We found the point at which the fire started, on the side of the road in a small pile of rubbish,” Kettis said.

However, later in the day, Michael wrote in a post on social media that “today, I feel the need to write to everyone and refute the statement made by [Kettis] with all due respect to him and the fire service’s staff”.

“I was the first to go to the scene of the fire and I know very well what I saw. The fire started next to the road between Omodos and Potami on the edge of an abandoned garden. There was no rubbish there then and there is none now,” he said.

Kettis had said earlier in the day that firefighters remained on standby in the area.

The fire burned around one hectare of dry grass, wild vegetation, and rubbish, with the gardens of three houses said to have been “slightly affected”.

In addition, Kettis said the fire brigade is “on heightened alert” due to the extreme high temperatures forecast for the weekend and the early part of next week.

As such, he called on the public to be “very careful”.

“It’s the weekend. People are going to go out. They must be very careful in their activities and what they do, because a fire can start very easily,” he said.

Earlier, he had told CyBC radio that there are around 450 illegal dumps across the island and warned of the potential dire consequences of fires which break out in rubbish dumps.

Such fires, he said, “can easily escalate and threaten villages”.

He then called on local authorities to “act responsibly and clean those areas”.

The fire in Omodos broke out on Friday afternoon and was contained shortly afterwards.

Kettis had said at the time that a total of eight fire engines belonging to the fire brigade and five more from the forestry department had been dispatched to fight the fire, while five firefighting aircraft were also deployed.

In addition, he said, the game service, the civil defence, the district government, and other organised volunteer groups also worked to support efforts to fight the fire, operating water tankers and earth movers.