Backpackers' hostel fire alarm 'had been turned off' before blaze
A fire alarm at a backpackers' hostel had been switched off the night as flames swept through the building, killing 15 young travellers, a court has been told.
Queensland state government electrical safety officer Alan Faulks, who checked the Palace Backpacker Hostel's fire alarm system after the June 23 blaze, told the court it had been manually switched off and no alarm bells would have rung to warn of the fire.
Prosecutors who have charged Robert Paul Long with arson and murdering two of the 15 victims did not immediately suggest who could have turned off the alarm.
Earlier today, a witness testified that he saw a man resembling Long near a burning refuse bin shortly before fire gutted the hostel in the southern Queensland town of Childers.
English backpacker Neil Griffith told Brisbane Magistrates Court he found the can filled with burning paper when he went into a room at the hostel. He told the court he asked a man, who was sitting at a computer terminal in the room, to help dispose of the burning trash can.
"He grabbed the bin and walked off to the rear of the building," Mr Griffith, a 25-year-old engineer said in a telephone link-up from Cambridge, England. "I believed him to have dealt with the fire. I walked back up the stairs to go to bed."
But just an hour later, Mr Griffith had to crawl through choking black smoke and clamber over the roof of a neighboring building to escape the hostel which had been engulfed by flames.
Mr Griffith said the man looked like Long, the 37-year-old fruit picker charged with starting the fire and with murdering Australian twins Kelly and Stacey Slarke. The 22-year-old twins were among six backpackers from Britain, four from Australia, two from the Netherlands and one each from Ireland, South Korea and Japan who died in the fire.
In later testimony, Martin Woods, who works in a Childers' bar, said he was given, about a week before the fire, a suicide note written by Long. Mr Woods did not say who gave him the note.
Long has not been required to enter a plea to the charges. He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.
