The blame game was in full swing on Friday at the parliament during the second meeting on the devastating Limassol fire in July where tensions were high and there were more questions than answers in play.
The meeting, chaired by House President Annita Demetriou, came hot on the heels of the release of the much-anticipated fire report by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) which was released just Thursday evening.
It is not clear what the government of Nikos Christodoulides or anyone else expected from the ATF report when inviting the US officials to come and investigate the fire. It neither exonerates nor assigns blame to anyone. It merely identifies the point of origin of the fire and the cause of ignition, which they concluded was one, possibly two lit cigarettes, labelling the fire “accidental”. The ATF also noted numerous other cigarette butts, unburned, on the edge of the roadway near the ignition point just metres away.
It also noted the area was an illegal dumping site but everything they examined there was excluded as being the cause.
Aside from its conclusion, the ATF report gives a timeline of the fire based on weather conditions, topographical details and interviews with local people and officials but makes no judgement about the handling of the situation. It was entirely forensic and others will have to make those conclusions. The question is who?
The ATF report took up a huge amount of discussion at the House, which had supposedly gathered to discuss the response to the fire with Demetriou asking whether the cigarette butts had just been sitting there waiting for the Americans to come and find them.
Fire chief Nikos Longinos insisted that the fire may have been arson. He said that while he did not dispute the findings, they did not preclude arson. Earlier in the day, police chief Themistos Arnaoutis had said there was no evidence that the fire had been started maliciously.
And so, it went on hour after hour.
Somewhat in Longinos’ defence, it really was an odd location to randomly stop for a smoke on a searing summer’s day. There is of course a possibility the smoker in question emptied his car ashtray out the window while driving by, or went there to illegally dump something with a cigarette dangling from his mouth that he then carelessly discarded.
That doesn’t make someone an arsonist but it should not matter whether it was arson or not. It’s already illegal to cause a fire in the countryside, carrying a prison sentence of up to 10 years or a fine of up to €75,000, or both.
Still, Longinos’ insistence that it could have been arson is peculiar, especially when there are so many questions related to the overall response. Would the fact of it being arson diminish the need to answer those questions?
As one MP quite rightly said: “I don’t care how the fire started. I care why the fire didn’t go out”.
The simple answer to that is more than likely a total lack of coordination across state services.
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