Algeria’s president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has declared three days of national mourning amid the death toll from raging wildfires in the north of the country rising to 69.

The state-run news agency APS said the rash of more than 50 fires which broke out on Tuesday had claimed four more lives, bringing the total to 69, including 28 soldiers deployed to help the emergency services.

Tebboune said the three days of national mourning would start on Thursday. The authorities said they suspected widespread arson since so many fires had erupted in such a short space of time. Several arrests were announced, but the identities or suspected motives of those detained were not disclosed.

Images of trapped villagers, terrified livestock and forested hillsides reduced to blackened stumps, were shared on social media, many accompanied by pleas for help.

AFP journalists saw villagers desperately trying to put out the spreading fires with makeshift brooms in an effort to save their homes.

High winds fuelled the rapid spread of the flames in tinder-dry conditions created by a heatwave across north Africa and the wider Mediterranean, Youcef Ould Mohamed, a fire official, told APS.

Scores of separate wildfires remained active on Wednesday, spread across 17 provinces, said the emergency services spokesman, Nassim Barnaoui.

Most of the fires and 16 of the deaths were recorded in Tizi Ouzou district, in the mainly Berber region of Kabyle, east of the capital, Algiers.

“I left all my stock in my village and fled to Tizi Ouzou with my wife and three children,” said Abdelhamid Boudraren, a shopkeeper from the village of Beni Yeni.

Letreche Hakim, head of civil protection in Bejaia, the second biggest city in Kabyle, told APS the situation was alarming.

There have been growing calls for aid convoys to be sent to the worst-hit districts with food and medicine from the capital. On Wednesday an AFP correspondent saw several lorries heading to Tizi Ouzou with aid donated by the public.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on Twitter that France would send two Canadair firefighting planes and a command aircraft to the Kabyle region on Thursday to help.

Morocco, with whom Algeria has long had strained ties over the Western Sahara, also expressed readiness to help. Two Canadair planes, “if the Algerian authorities agreed”, would be offered, a Moroccan foreign ministry statement said.

Algeria is also chartering two firefighting planes from the EU, aircraft recently being used to stop fires in Greece.

Heavy smoke and flames rising in the forested hills of the Kabyle region, on 11 August.

Meteorologists expect the heatwave across north Africa to continue until the end of the week, with temperatures in Algeria reaching 46C (115F).

In Tunisia the temperature in the capital, Tunis, hit an all-time record of 49C on Tuesday. The Tunisian emergency services reported 15 fires across the north and north-west, but no casualties.

Turkey reported eight deaths, and Greece three deaths from wildfires that have been raging for the past two weeks.

Each summer Algeria endures seasonal wildfires but rarely anything approaching this year’s disaster. In 2020 nearly 440 sq km (170 sq miles) of forest were destroyed by fire.

On Monday a major report by the UN body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released and showed how the threat from global warming was even more acute than previously thought.

The report highlighted how scientists are quantifying the extent to which human-induced warming increases the intensity and likelihood of a specific extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and wildfires. Climate change amplifies droughts, creating ideal conditions for wildfires to spread out of control and inflict unprecedented damage.