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Australian wildfires claim more lives

Special task force to hunt arsonists

AFP, Healesuille
Australian firefighters fought yesterday to save communities from wildfires that have claimed 181 lives and left a trail of charred bodies in blackened homes and twisted car wreclcs.
As investigators launched the country's largest ever arson investigation, police warned that the death toll - already the worst in Australia's history -- would rise further during the week.
" Road by road, house by house, we are working our way through," Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon said.
"We believe the toll will rise. It's a very sad thing for all of us in our community... we hope towards the end of the weekend that the toll will start to settle in terms of numbers.”
In devastated Kinglake, Ross Buchanan risked his life to save his home - - only to find his 15-year-old son McKenzie and daughter Neeve, nine, had been killed as fire ripped through the rest of tire town.
"I've lost two kids, nothing can bring them back," he told Sky News.
The mounting number of bodies has forced authorities to set up a temporary morgue in Melbourne which has so far admitted 101 victims, theVictoria state coroner said.
Nixon said a special task force involving 100
officers, dubbed Operation Phoenix, would investigate all aspects of the fires, including tracking down arsonists responsible for some of the blazes.
She said authorities were confident of arresting one blamed for starting and repeatedly reigniting fires in Gippsland, in Victoria's east, where al most 20 people have died.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described the arsonists as "mass murderers," and Victoria Police Minister Bob Cameron said authorities were determined to catch them.
"The sooner that they're taken out of the community the better for everybody's sake," he told Sky News. "We now know the devastation that they've caused."
Exhausted firefighters, most of them volunteers who have had little rest since the firestorms flared on Saturday, had more immediate concerns as they tried to save communities in the path of the flames.
Healesville, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) northeast of Melbourne, was the latest community threatened by the fires, which razed entire towns over the weekend.
Victoria's Country Fire Authority warned the town was in danger from "heavy ember attack," a phenomenon that survivors who have faced it liken to a fiery hailstorm of burningembers.