A man arrested last week as a suspect in five fires deliberately set in Montreal has served a lot of time behind bars over the past three decades for several arson convictions.
Alain Paillé, 59, was arrested by Montreal police on Aug. 1, shortly after a fire was set inside a garbage container behind a building on Crescent St. Montreal police said he is a suspect in a total of five arsons between July 29 and the day of his arrest. The other fires were set inside garbage containers and in a vehicle.
Hours after his arrest, Paillé was charged with five counts of arson and one count of being in possession of an incendiary device. He remains in jail pending a court appearance on Aug. 21.
Paillé’s criminal record includes several convictions for acts of arson throughout the province dating as far back as 1991.
Most recently, in 2014, Paillé received a 69-month prison sentence after he pleaded guilty at the Granby courthouse to arson and possessing an incendiary device. He admitted to setting fire to a container behind a residential building in Granby. At the time, he was reported to be a suspect in several other fires set in the same city earlier the same winter.
On July 14, 2010, Paillé was sentenced to a 38-month prison term after he pleaded guilty to setting a fire behind a building at 6550 Jeanne Mance St. in Mile End on Feb. 1 of that year. In that case, the fire was extinguished by police officers and caused only minor damage. Following his arrest in that case, Montreal police said Paillé was a suspect in about 10 fires that had been deliberately set, between June 2009 and January 2010, in Plateau Mont-Royal , but he was only charged with the fire in Mile End.
When he was arrested for the fire on Jeanne Mance St., he was still serving a 23-month sentence he’d received, on May 15, 2008, for having set another fire in Montreal.
In 1991, Paillé admitted to setting three fires in Quebec City and he received a three-year prison sentence.