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Any arsonists found responsible for deadly fires that killed at
least 21 people in Gippsland should be
forced to pull charred bodies from cars, devastated residents
say.
Police say they're closing in on a suspect believed to have lit fires in the Gippsland area in the days before Saturday's firestorm ripped through the Victorian region.
They expect to release a photofit image of the suspect in coming days.
Meanwhile, a police taskforce has been formed to look at every fire site and determine if they were deliberately lit. Taskforce Phoenix will also investigate all fire-related deaths and prepare briefs for the coroner.
The rage over so many deaths remained palpable on Tuesday, given that police consider the Gippsland fires suspicious.
"I reckon they (any arsonists caught) should be going up there taking bodies out of cars," said Daryl Paine, whose house in the small central Gippsland community of Callignee was destroyed.
At least 12 of the township's 500-odd residents were killed by the 40,000 hectare Churchill fire.
"Material things are nothing, but people have died up there," Paine said.
The overall death toll from Victoria's bushfires reached 181 on Tuesday. Many of the victims perished in their cars as they tried to flee.
Di Matthews, whose daughter lost her Callignee home, called for life prison terms for arsonists, who've been branded mass murderers by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
"There's got to be really harsh penalties. I don't know how they're going to go trying to find them," Matthews said.
"If they find them they should be severely punished, they've caused so much heartache to so many people, definitely life in jail."
Roland Roylance successfully defended his Callignee North home and labelled arsonists "idiots".
"What can you say, there's idiots out there, always have been, always will be," he said.
Crime Department Assistant Commissioner Dannye (Dannye) Moloney will command the newly formed Taskforce Phoenix, with 25 detectives and 100 staff.
Its work is expected to take six to 12 months to complete, and major areas of investigation will include the fires at Bendigo, Kilmore and Wandong, Churchill in Gippsland, Marysville and Beechworth.
Moloney was involved in similar investigations after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires.
He told reporters that two separate arson investigations were operating in the Churchill area.
"Approximately five to seven days beforehand (before Saturday's Gippsland inferno) there were a number of other fires up in that area," he said.
"There are suspicious fires out there. The Churchill fires, as far as we can conclude at this stage, must be considered as suspicious and that is being investigated as we speak."
He said "there may be some photofits" available soon relating to a person believed to be involved in the fires that sprang up in the days before the devastating weekend fire.
He urged communities to be patient and allow authorities to complete their tasks thoroughly.
"At the end of the day we hope to identify all of the victims,
establish how they died, and produce inquest briefs on every
individual deceased for the coroner to determine cause of death
and
other issues," he said.
He said the task ahead was made more difficult by the fact that some victims had died in the homes of neighbours and friends to which they'd fled.
"We have houses there with unknown people within them. We've now got to identify and track their movement," he said.
"Similarly, we have people that left their homes, drove, got trapped, left their vehicles, pedestrians who got picked up by other motorists trying to escape this tragedy and were killed in cars in the passenger seats.
"We must pin this all together to give the coroner the ability to actually work out how these people came to be trapped in the fires and were killed."
Moloney called on anyone with information relating to arson to
contact Crime Stoppers.
Do you have friends or relatives who have been caught up in Victoria's bushfires? If so, ONE News would like to hear from you. Email us at news@tvnz.co.nz or phone 0800 886397 or 09 916 7321.
Click here to find out how you can donate to the victims of the Australian bushfires.
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