WHITTLESEA, Australia — Suspicions that the worst wildfires ever to strike Australia were deliberately set led police to declare crime scenes today in towns incinerated by blazes, while investigators moving into the charred landscape discovered more bodies. The death toll stood at 130.
Officials think arson might be behind at least some of the more than 400 fires that tore a destructive path across a vast swath of southern Victoria state over the weekend. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, visibly upset during a television interview, reflected national disgust at the idea.
“What do you say about anyone like that?” Rudd said. “There’s no words to describe it, other than it’s mass murder.”
Police have sealed off at least two towns, Marysville and Kinglake, where dozens of deaths occurred.
Victoria Police Commissioner Christine Nixon said fire investigators were on the ground at one fire site, in Churchill, east of Melbourne, and would go to others.
Kinglake is “where the most deaths are, but wherever a death has occurred, we investigate that as a crime,” Nixon told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Anyone found guilty of lighting a wildfire that causes death faces 25 years in prison in Victoria.
At least 750 homes were destroyed. Officials said the tolls of human life and property would almost certainly rise.
Although weather conditions have eased since Saturday’s inferno, more than a dozen fires still burned in Victoria and gusting winds threatened to fan them toward towns not previously hit.
Forecasters said temperatures might rise again later in the week.
Blazes have been burning for weeks in the southeastern state of Victoria but turned deadly Saturday when searing temperatures and wind blasts created a firestorm that swept across the region. A long-running drought in the south, the worst in a century, had left forests extra dry, and fire conditions Saturday were said to be the worst ever in Australia.
From the air, the landscape was blackened as far as the eye could see. Entire forests were reduced to leafless, charred trunks, farmland to ashes. The Victoria Country Fire Service said about 850 square miles were burned out.
Only five houses were left standing out of about 40 in one neighborhood of the hard-hit Kinglake district that an Associated Press news crew flew over. Street after street was lined with smoldering wrecks of homes, roofs collapsed, iron roof sheets twisted from the heat. The burned-out hulks of cars dotted roads. A church was smoldering, with only one wall with a giant cross etched into it standing.
Residents were repeatedly advised on radio and television to initiate their so-called “fire plan” — whether it be staying in their homes to battle the flames or to evacuate before the roads became too dangerous.
But some of the deaths were people who were apparently caught by the fire as they fled in their cars or were killed when charred tree limbs fell on their vehicles.
