News Service from House Harris

Vic: Taskforce set up to investigate arsonists, identify victims

MELBOURNE, Feb 10 AAP - Police believe they are closing in on an arsonist responsible for a fire that led to the deaths of 21 people in Victoria's Gippsland region.

Officers expect to soon release a photofit image of the suspect and a taskforce has been formed to look at every fire site and determine if they were deliberately lit.

The 25-member Taskforce Phoenix will also investigate all fire-related deaths and prepare briefs for the coroner using information supplied by specialist victim identification teams.

The taskforce's work is expected to take six to 12 months.

Crime Department Assistant Commissioner Dannye (Dannye) Moloney, who assisted similar probes after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, will command the taskforce.

Major areas of investigation include fires at Bendigo, Kilmore and Wandong, Churchill in Gippsland, Marysville and Beechworth.

Two separate arson investigations are underway in the Churchill area, Mr Moloney told reporters.

"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 added: "All the other fire sites are obviously slowly, but surely, being investigated by our arson experts.

"And as the reports come in and as they go through their scientific examinations we will establish the causes of what happened out there last Saturday and Sunday."

Mr Moloney 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.