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A Florida woman was shoplifting from an upmarket department store when her car caught fire with her two children inside.

Alicia Moore, 24, parker her vehicle in the car park outside a Dillard’s at the Oviedo Mall in Oviedo, a city 15 miles northeast of Orlando, last week.

She walked towards the shopping mall with an unidentified man, leaving behind her two and four-year-old child who ‘could not care for themselves’, police said.

The pair shoplifted for about an hour, shop security said, before exiting the store at around 1pm on May 26, according to WKMG in Orlando.

Moore came outside to find her car ‘engulfed in flames’, dropping her stolen merchandise on the floor and running to the scene, per an affidavit.

Her children are thought to have been playing with matches inside her car, igniting a blaze that saw flames spill out of the car windows and send billowing smoke into the air.

Shoppers had spotted the fire and helped rescue the two children. They were then taken to Arnold Palmer Hospital with minor injuries.

One child, according to the affidavit, suffered first-degree burns to their face and ears.

Video footage captured on a nearby Tesla car and shared by the City of Oviedo showed flames slowly consuming the car and breaking through a window.

One witness told dispatchers, according to 911 audio from ClickOrlando: ‘There was a car – I don’t know, somehow is on fire outside at the parking lot at Dillard’s.

‘And there was two kids and a mum, and I think she realised there was a child still in the car, and the car is completely engulfed in flames.’

Police officials are still determining the cause of the fire but said that if Moore ‘was not being neglectful,’ her children would not have been injured that day.

Moore was arrested by the Orlando Police Department for unrelated outstanding warrants in other counties.

While held in custody, she was further charged with great bodily harm and first-degree arson, according to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office.

For those charges, she is held on $40,000 bond.

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