Trebinje: Up to Eight Years in Prison for Starting Fires

The Trebinje Police Directorate has launched an effort to gather operational information on those who set fires around the city, with the penalty for deliberate arson set out in the Criminal Code of Republika Srpska: one to eight years in prison. For Serbia, this is a matter of border area security that touches the country directly: Trebinje sits next to the border with Montenegro, on the road toward Herceg Novi that large numbers of Serbian tourists travel every summer, and the flames that closed in on the village of Gucine overnight show just how quickly the situation on the ground can shift.

Dejan Kasikovic, commander of the Trebinje Territorial Firefighting and Rescue Unit, told RTRS at 08:40 on August 26 that the situation at the fire site was stable this morning.

“The situation at the fire site around Trebinje is stable this morning,” Kasikovic said, adding that firefighters had managed to secure all the critical points that had threatened nearby villages and the settlement of Gucine overnight.

According to him, fire was also active in the villages of Kremeni Do and Zeljevo, but local residents put it out themselves before organized units reached the scene. Since the morning hours, a Bosnia and Herzegovina Armed Forces helicopter has joined the firefighting effort, dousing the flames from the air over terrain that is difficult for fire trucks to reach.

A new fire broke out around Trebinje on August 25 at about 7 p.m., with a power line cited as the cause. The flames were again moving down toward the city at a point when, by estimates, more than 6,000 hectares had already burned across the wider Trebinje area. Our paper covered that earlier phase of the fire in the piece “Helicopters defend Trebinje, seven municipalities burning in Montenegro,” when the fire was raging simultaneously on the Montenegrin side of the border.

The Trebinje Police Directorate said officers from its Department for Explosive Materials and Fire Protection are carrying out on-site investigations at every location where fire broke out, collecting traces and evidence for further proceedings. Police say the exact cause is often hard to establish, since most of the traces burn away and the scene is further contaminated during the firefighting itself. Dry grass, low vegetation and high temperatures, police add, further favor the fire’s rapid spread.

The Criminal Code of Republika Srpska sets a prison term of one to eight years for deliberately starting a fire. For starting a fire through negligence, the penalty is a fine or one to three years in prison.

Milos Vucurevic, commander of the Lastva Volunteer Firefighting Society, called for strict sanctions against residents who carelessly light fires without notifying the authorities.

“They cause a huge disaster. The cause is the human factor, because people are careless, they light fires on their own responsibility, they think it’s fine to do it that way, they won’t report it to us so we can come and secure the site when they want to clear stubble and things like that,” Vucurevic said.

The Trebinje Police Directorate says it has spent years working to strengthen cooperation with the local community, Civil Protection and firefighting units, in order to reduce the risk of fires breaking out and to make it easier to extinguish them and save people and property. The on-site investigation at the affected locations is still ongoing, and its outcome will determine whether anyone faces criminal charges over the fires that have threatened Trebinje and the surrounding villages for days.