(Los Angeles) A pyromaniac shooter is suspected of having set an ambush and then killed two firefighters in intervention on a fire in the American state of Idaho, before being found dead, the authorities announced on Sunday.
These firefighters, who operated in a mountainous area of the County of Kootenai, in the northwest of the United States, had wiped fire by trying to turn off a fire, and an exchange of shots between the suspect and the police had entered it for several hours.
“Based on preliminary information, we believe that he was the only shooter,” said the sheriff of this county, Robert Norris, during a press point.
“There is no longer any threat to the local population,” he said.
“We believe that the suspect triggered the fire and that it was an ambush, that it was intentional,” he also told journalists.
Some 300 police officers had been deployed, detailed the sheriff, adding that two firefighters in the region had lost their lives. “We have lost a heart firefighter from Alene, and we lost a County County firefighter,” added the sheriff.
Photo Young Kwak, Reuters
The Kootenai County Emergency Management Office alerted the population by asking to avoid the surroundings of the Canfield Mountain and Nettleton Gulch Road path, about 6.5 km north of the city center of Alene.
Another firefighter underwent surgery. “He fights for his survival, but he is in a stable state,” continued Robert Norris.
The sheriff’s office had indicated earlier than a “dead man” had been found with a firearm in Canfield Mountain, the shooting site.
The office has raised the order to contain the population but warned that the fire was still underway.
Images and a photo published by the NBC channel showed a dense white smoke rising above a hilly and wooded site in this popular area of hikers.
The chief firefighters in the area, Pat Riley, said he “broken heart” by the attack, on the local television channel KHQ.
Recurring scourge
“Several heroic firefighters were attacked today while they were working on a fire in northern Idaho,” said state governor Brad Little on X. He denounced “a direct odious attack against our courageous firefighters” in a press release published on Facebook.
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to it.
The country has more individual weapons than residents: one in three adults has at least one weapon and almost one in two adults lives in a home where a weapon is.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of dead by firearm in the United States, without comparison with that of other developed countries.
In 2024, more than 16,000 people, not to mention suicides, were killed by firearm, according to the NGO Gun Violence Archive.
