Investigators are probing fires at four townhouse construction sites in the GTA over the last week, including a suspicious blaze that destroyed eight homes and caused more than $1 million in damage in Mississauga early yesterday.
Police are not ruling out arson or that the fires are linked.
Yesterday’s blaze began shortly before 1:50 a.m. at Burnhamthorpe Road and Ponytrail Drive. More than a dozen rescue trucks spent more than an hour fighting the blaze.
The eight houses were still being built and were believed to be unoccupied. Eight other houses in the development were not affected.
Police are treating the fire as suspicious, and the fire marshal has been called in.
“The very fact that it has happened in the middle of the night with no one around (makes it suspicious),” Peel Region Const. Wayne Patterson said. “We will treat it as suspicious until proven otherwise.”
The fire comes on the heels of three others in the past few days — two in Brampton early Tuesday and one early Friday in Burlington.
“We aren’t dismissing the fact that they could be arsons, and we aren’t dismissing that they could be linked,” Patterson said. “But right now, we don’t have anything to link them.”
