The Draguignan public prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday the arrest of eleven people as part of a long-term investigation into “a vast system of illegal dumping of construction site waste“.
The catch of the net was launched this Tuesday morning in the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes. “Six headquarters of public works companies and two construction sites“were targeted in these two departments.
This “Terres Brûlées” operation is the result of an investigation initiated after several complaints were filed in Nice and Draguignan. The Marseille research section and the Var gendarmerie group were then seized for all of the facts.
Twenty illegal dumps
“Hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of earth, concrete, scrap metal and tar were dumped on some twenty irretrievably disfigured sites between Fréjus, Le Luc-en-Provence and Trans-en-Provence in the Var, up to Sospel in the Alpes-Maritimes. “
According to the Draguignan public prosecutor’s office, which has opened judicial information for multiple crimes (irregular management of waste in organized gangs, scams, laundering, etc.), “the system“at issue had been put in place”several years“.
Local construction companies, “some of whose leaders have a criminal record“, would have set up a clandestine channel for the disposal of rubble on private or public land”by deceiving or threatening the owners“.
Health risks
“The cost of land reclamation is considerable, when possible, specifies the prosecutor of Draguignan in a press release. Pollution by products dangerous to health, for example heavy metals, is to be feared“.
Operation Terres Brûlées mobilized nearly 200 soldiers from the Marseille research section, gendarmerie groups from Var and Alpes-Maritimes, mobile gendarmerie from Hyères, supported by a helicopter from the air section of the gendarmerie.
Agents from the Regional Department for the Environment, Planning and Housing (Dreal) and the Public Finance Department (DRFiP) also participated in the investigations.
Several trucks and construction equipment were seized, while the eleven suspects arrested were placed in police custody, said the prosecutor of Draguignan.
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