A teenager has been found guilty of setting a fire that destroyed Poundland in Elgin and cost in the region of £1 million.
The boy was just 15 when he lit sanitary products in the health and beauty aisle of the High Street store and it spread to nearby shelves of aerosols, causing a series of explosions.
It was accepted that the damage caused was likely to result in an insurance claim in the region of £1m.
The youth, now 17, denied a charge of culpable and reckless fireraising, claiming a teenage girl had instead been responsible for the blaze on August 12 2022.
CCTV was played to the jury that showed the boy in the area where the fire started minutes before it took hold.
During the course of the trial, the jurors had heard from a shopworker who was evacuated from the store at around 6pm.
Elgin Poundland worker heard ‘pops and bangs’
Under questioning from fiscal depute Susan Love, Julie Sherwin told the jurors: “I just heard the pops and bangs and it exploded.”
A teenage witness, who had been in the company of the accused in the moments after the fire, said he overheard the boy, who was 15 at the time, telling another youth “he had set fire to tampons” and “he didn’t think it would catch”.
The jury was played footage from the store, in which the accused was identified as being one of a number of people in the health and beauty aisle minutes before the fire.
Fire investigator Martin Rowland said the investigation had ruled out other possible causes and concluded that the cause of the fire was “deliberate application of a naked flame to items within the store”.
He was shown CCTV with the accused identified and confirmed it showed him near the spot where the fire was believed to have started.
On the final day of the trial, the reporting officer for Police Scotland, Michael McLennan, confirmed that footage from the scene had been checked and did not show the girl named in the incrimination defence in the store in the hour before the fire started.
‘You can’t start a fire without a spark’
In her closing speech for the prosecution, Ms Love told the jurors: “You can’t start a fire without a spark. [The accused] was that spark.”
Defence advocate Bill Adam asked them to consider the possibility of a second fire being responsible for the damage saying: “The defence position is there were two fires and I would suggest you can see that on the CCTV.”
He asked them to consider: “Who started the second fire, the most ferocious fire, the one that caused all the damage?”
But the jury took less than 40 minutes to reject his suggestion, returning a unanimous guilty verdict to the single charge.
Sheriff Eilidh MacDonald heard that the boy had no previous convictions and no cases outstanding.
She deferred sentencing for the production of reports, with the case due to call again in March and the teenager released on bail in the meantime.