Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said on Wednesday that the Mafia had little to do with the forest blazes that have been sweeping central and southern Italy this summer in one of the country's worst fire emergencies in decades.
"It would be easy for us to put it down to organised crime groups but they have nothing to do with it, or very little," the minister said.
Over the past two months, the fires have claimed 12 lives and destroyed thousands of hectares of forest, woodland and coastal brush as well as dozens of properties.
Arsonists have been blamed in most cases and Premier Romano Prodi has called for "the greatest severity" in punishing "such unthinkable crimes".
Suspicion usually focuses on farmers seeking to clear space for agricultural purposes or land developers hoping to win permits for new constructions.
It is also believed that firefighters themselves and seasonal workers with the Forestry Corps, cleanup squads and reforestation programmes set fire to woods in the hope of creating new jobs.
Amato said 250 people had been charged with arson this year, although police had been able to arrest only eight because they were the only ones actually caught in the act.
He said most of the arsonists had turned out to be animal farmers seeking more land for grazing or people hoping to be hired in connection with the fire emergency.
He said a large number of arson cases were also the result of personal rows and vendettas.
Civil defence chief Guido Bertolaso, who has just been put in charge of handling the crisis, agreed that criminal organisations were playing a "marginal role".
"These fires are being started for hunting, farming or building purposes," he said.
He called on the judicial authorities to apply the maximum penalties when arsonists were caught, saying that the law was not working as a deterrent and that all too often, such criminals got off lightly.
On Wednesday, a 43-year-old qualified female pharmacist was caught setting fire to a public dump site near Salerno to the south of Naples.
Her motives were not yet clear, police said.
According to data released by the Forestry Corps, there have been 680 fires in national parks and nature reserves this year, causing the destruction of 19,000 hectares.
Firefighters have been called out almost 52,000 times over the past four months, the data showed.
On Wednesday, major blazes were still raging in the regions of Campania around Naples, Calabria on the foot of Italy and Lazio around Rome, including one which was destroying hectares of parkland close to the ancient Etruscan city of Veio.
