Tebboune orders death penalty for forest arson after Algeria's latest fire week

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune told Algeria's justice minister on Sunday to submit, by 15 September, a penal-code change that would make death the sentence for anyone convicted of deliberately lighting a forest fire. State media carried the order after a cabinet-level meeting on the fires that tore through Jijel, Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou last week. Tebboune added a second sentence that leaves less room for later softening. There will be execution, he said.

Algeria already lists capital punishment for several crimes. No one has been executed since 1993. Deliberate forest arson now carries up to 30 years, or life in some cases. The 15 September deadline is therefore not about inventing a new crime. It is about taking a penalty that has sat unused for 33 years and pointing it at a specific act.

Interior Minister Said Sayoud put the official toll at 12 dead and 54 injured, six of them in intensive care. Five of the dead were in Jijel, four in Bejaia, three in Tizi Ouzou. Tebboune declared three days of national mourning and cancelled cultural and sporting events. He ordered governors to hand fire files to the security services and said several people had already been arrested. Videos, he said, showed a number of fires starting at about 1 a.m. at the same time, which raised questions.

The gap in the count

Independent Algerian reporters do not accept the 12. Journalist and fact-checker Nozha Khelalef compiled 57 names from death notices by Thursday, a list carried by the site Twala. The hospital at El Milia told ANSA it had at least 69 dead the same day. Local counts gathered by TV5Monde from communes and hospitals ran from 57 to more than 90. Le Monde, working from the same week, described fires of rare intensity in Jijel and Bejaia and a much higher unofficial death list. BBC News noted that some independent outlets believe the true figure is far above the ministry number.

That gap is the political fact. A state that puts 12 on the communique and then reaches for the gallows is asking the public to treat arson as the main cause before the public has an agreed number of dead. Civil protection said 154 fires were recorded across the country on a single day during the North African heatwave. Eighteen of 19 new blazes in a later 24-hour window were put out, according to the official agency. Half of the larger set were reported under control. Those operational notes can be true at the same time as the death list is incomplete.

Tebboune ordered compensation for families and committees to price damaged property and alternative housing. He told reluctant listeners that society and justice would take their due. The language is meant to sound like resolve. It also pre-empts a slower inquiry into whether the week was a crime wave, a weather event, or both.

What the amendment will have to decide

Three drafting questions will decide whether the 15 September text is a statute or a slogan. First, what proof will separate a deliberate lighting from a fire that started in a drought. Second, whether the death sentence will be mandatory or left to judges who have not sent anyone to the scaffold since 1993. Third, whether people already arrested last week will be tried under the old 30-year maximum or under the new text. Retroactive use of a harsher penalty is the point at which a mourning order becomes a legal fight.

Algeria has lived through fire seasons that killed dozens in earlier years. The 2021 outbreak is still the satellite image most outsiders remember. What is new in 2026 is the president's decision to end the long pause on executions for this offence, on a two-week clock, while the unofficial death count is still moving. The justice ministry now has to write a clause that can survive a courtroom. The hospitals in El Milia and the communes in Jijel have a different task: naming the dead the communique left out.