How family fleeing flames took a wrong turn to death

As they sat outside their pine lodge in Provence, Margaret Timson and her 15-year-old granddaughter Kirsty Egerton were lost in concentration over the Scrabble board. A few yards away, Margaret's husband, Norman, carefully tended the garden of the converted retirement home in the mountainous Maures massif region.

Within minutes grandmother and granddaughter were dead, victims of the forest fires rampaging at breakneck speed across the region of France north of St Tropez.

Yesterday, as the French President, Jacques Chirac, vowed to catch the arsonists responsible for the disaster, Mr Timson, 65, told a neighbour in the nearby hamlet of Bas Oliviers: "How can I tell my daughter that her child has been burnt to death?"

The frantic bid for escape began when Mr Timson, a former soldier, ordered the two women to drive to safety as he struggled to fight the encroaching flames with a garden hose. However, they took a fatal wrong turn and their Citroen quickly became engulfed in flames, fanned by a hot mistral wind, forcing them to flee on foot in a futile search for shelter.

Werner Viertmann, a neighbour, told the Evening Standard: "Norman was beside himself. It was a desperate story. If only she turned right instead of left, she would have escaped the fire. But in that place, where they were found, there was no way out."

The two women were among five people killed in recent days in France and Portugal as the continent's worst drought since 1976 has combined explosively with high winds and mindless acts of arson and carelessness.

A 30-year-old man admitted yesterday to starting nine fires in recent weeks in the forests of the Var departement, near Fréjus, where the two Britons died. Stéphane Jousse told an investigating magistrate that he had acted out of "spite" because he had been rejected as a voluntary fireman. Fire chiefs in the Var area warned they were racing against time to control two new blazes before mistral winds of up to 50mph arrive from the south and south-east this morning. They said the ferocity of Monday's fire in the massif - which spread 10 miles in four hours at one stage and forced the evacuation of more than 20,000 people - was unprecedented. Another thousand tourists were evacuated from a campsite in the same area yesterday.

Worse may be to come. The risk of forest fires is traditionally at its height in southern France in the second half of August. The severity of the blazes in the past 10 days, which have destroyed 60,000 acres of forest and scrub, is explained partly by the deep drought that has settled on the southern and eastern parts of France since February. More than 500 other high-risk areas in the south of France, where the vegetation is explosively dry, have been signalled to the fire authorities.

Seventeen fireman were injured, and two burnt severely, while fighting a fire in scrubland near the town of Salon-en-Provence, north of Marseilles, yesterday.

As well as identifying wilful acts of arson, fire officials and environmentalists have blamed the carelessness of some campers and the imprudence of owners of private forests who have allowed their land to become choked with dense scrub and imported species, which dry out more rapidly than native ones.

Hundreds of campers, many of them British, had to be evacuated from campsites in the Maures range of coastal mountains on Monday evening.

In Portugal, a man of 60 died when a forest fire engulfed his home at Fundao, 140 miles north-east of Lisbon. More than 500 firefighters and 300 soldiers have been tackling fires on three fronts since Sunday.

Yesterday, French fire officials were suggesting that at least some of the fires could have been started by accident or carelessness.