According to the commander of the local Civil Protection and Fire Service, João Cassua, the incident occurred when a 57-year-old man set fire to the grass, which spread to the rest of the vegetation with the force of wind.
The suspect, a security guard protecting an antenna of a telecommunications company set up in that forest polygon, is already being held by the police, Lindo Ngola, a spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Service, said.
João Cassua, quoted by Angop, stressed that it took 27 staff and four firefighters' vehicles to extinguish the fire, which lasted four hours due to the specificity of the forest.
The Matari-a-Njinga forest polygon, which covers an area of six thousand hectares, is located about 15 kilometres from the city of Malanje and has already recorded an incident of this type in 2015.
After its destruction during the war, the polygon was repopulated between 2012 and 2017, when 137,600 eucalyptus trees were replanted on 220 hectares of land in a 4.4 million dollars provincial government project.
