(ANSA) - Messina, March 5 - Italian police on Thursday arrested a man in a village near Messina in Sicily suspected of setting a string of mysterious fires to get government aid. Giuseppe Pezzino, 26, was arrested for allegedly starting the blazes that have baffled locals since 2004 with the help of his father, who was placed under investigation. Pezzino was first placed under investigation in October when Carabinieri paramilitary police searched 11 homes and several vehicles in the hamlet of Canneto di Caronia, where cases of apparent spontaneous combustion have been dumbfounding residents and experts alike for more than 10 years. Giuseppe Pezzino, 25, was probed in connection with incidents that took place between July and October last year, police said. He allegedly set fire to home appliances in an apparent attempt to have them billed as unexplained phenomena that qualified for cash aid, authorities said. The local mayor remained unconvinced that a human being might well be behind the mysterious fires that have been plaguing his hamlet. "I myself, along with law enforcement and national journalists, have seen objects burst into flames out of nowhere," said Mayor Calogero Beringheli. Beginning in February 2004, items ranging from air conditioning units, fuse boxes, refrigerators and washing machines to microwave ovens and a car appear to have gone up in spontaneous combustion. Canneto, which consists of a single street positioned between a railway line and the sea, was evacuated in March 2004 after a spate of blazes. After months of inconclusive tests by scientists, authorities allowed residents to return to their homes. The fires then resumed when three electrical sockets caught fire. Villagers watched as geologists, electricians, telephone technicians and police investigators played cat-and-mouse with the mysterious phenomena. The dozens of scientists and researchers brought in to explain the fires - apparently caused by sudden rushes of electrical power - never managed to witness an outbreak as it happened and to monitor it. At one stage in the 2004 inquiries, an engineer said Max Planck's quantum theory and Albert Einstein's photon theory were implicated in an underground energy accumulation that had been channelled upwards via a network of wires to cause the "spontaneous combustion."