Police hunt Vic bushfire arson suspect

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 residents were killed by the 40,000 hectare
Churchill fire.
"Material things are nothing, but people have died up there," Mr 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.
Victorian Premier John Brumby said the death toll would rise well beyond 200 and the
coroner had conceded as much.
"There's still a large number of people - in excess of 50 - who are unconfirmed and
essentially these are people who the coroner believes are already deceased, but are
not yet identified," he told reporters in Mudgegonga.
"When you see these areas from the air it's just a sickening feeling, particularly
Kinglake and Marysville ... there's just hundreds and hundreds of houses completely
obliterated so the toll will continue to rise."
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," Ms 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 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.
Mr 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."
Mr Moloney called on anyone with information relating to arson to contact Crime
Stoppers.
Australian soldiers are assisting the grisly task of searching for victims, with one
reservist having discovered six bodies.
Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said some 460 Australian Defence Force personnel
were assisting in the relief operation, with more arriving all the time.
Among them are 140 reservists who had been training to deploy to the Solomon Islands.
"In addition to that we have got another 170 who are playing a search role, very
sadly," he told Sky News on Tuesday.
"They face the task of finding dead bodies and that's happening on a regular basis."
Mr Fitzgibbon said the size of the force engaged in the search for victims was an
indication of the scale of the disaster.
"One of those reservists came across six bodies last evening," he said.
"This is really challenging work for our reservists.
"These are civilian volunteers and it's a reminder to the broader community of the
important role our reservists play in the Australian Defence Force."
Another 100 soldiers in an engineering group were using bulldozers to create fire
containment lines and to reopen roads and fire trails.
Mr Fitzgibbon said the presence of uniformed personnel provided a sense of security
and confidence to others involved in the relief mission.
"They are doing real and meaningful work and it is appreciated by the other
authorities that they are supporting," he said.