
Horrific new details emerge of how burlesque dancer died while she tried to flee flames engulfing her home - as cops name prime suspect accused of masterminding bungled arson attack and why it happened
Ms Tangey, otherwise known as Vivien May-Royale, died in the targeted house fire in Truganina, in Melbourne's west, in the early hours of January 16.
She made a desperate triple-0 call shortly after 2am, telling the operator she couldn't get out of the burning house in Dover Street.
Ms Tangey then desperately tried to escape the inferno through a window on the top floor of the home, but she became trapped and burnt to death in the flames.
On Monday, Victoria Police offered a $500,000 reward for anyone who could help bring Ms Tangey's killers to justice.
Two men who started the blaze are still on the run, but police have now publicly admitted for the first time that they believe Hamad ordered the bungled firebombing.
'I'm six months into the investigation now and what I can say is this - yes, he's involved,' Homicide Squad Detective Inspector Chris Murray said on Monday.
'From the information we have, the illegal tobacco trade is front and centre as to why this incident occurred.
'We know there was a theft of (Hamad's) commodities, being illegal tobacco and we know that he sought retribution.
'Unfortunately... the two buffoons who committed this act targeted the wrong address.'
Inspector Murray said he was not suggesting Hamad deliberately targeted Ms Tangey, but his alleged tasking of the job was ultimately behind the crime.
'We know he's overseas. We're all ears,' he said. 'In fairness, I'd say even he would be disgusted as to what's transpired here.
'If he's got any sense of decency, I'm sure he can get us on the phone and let us know the two individuals who actually did this.
'They should be held accountable. They should be held responsible and brought to justice so we can give some closure to Katie's family.'
Detectives refused to reveal who they believe was Hamad's real target for the firebombing on the night Ms Tangey died.
'We're very confident that we know the motive,' Det Insp Murray said.
'We're fairly solid on the motive now. We're fairly solid on what's transpired. Our focus is to identify those two individuals who committed this act.
'Others can be held accountable in various other ways, but we want to identify those two because they are solely responsible, in my view, for killing Katie.'
Inspector Murray described the horror Ms Tangey faced in her final agonising moments alive.
'(Ms Tangey) was a completely innocent individual who had nothing to do with this illegal tobacco trade at all,' he said.
'(She) was asleep in bed, in the early hours. One can only imagine how scared she must have been.'
In a fresh twist, it was revealed an anonymous phone call was made to Crime Stoppers in which police were given a pseudonym or nickname linked to the attack.
Police are now asking that person to contact them again in the hope they may be able to provide more information.
Detectives earlier released an image of a man, described as slim, Middle Eastern, and aged between 25 and 30, whom they wish to speak to about the tragedy.
'Detectives are particularly keen to hear from anyone who recognises the man in the image or has any further information on the nickname provided in the call to Crime Stoppers,' a police statement added.
In June, police raided a home in Dandenong in relation to the crime and seized a phone.
Ms Tangey had been house sitting with her brother's golden retriever, Sunny, who also died inside the three-storey townhouse.
Her brother Ethan Tangey and his wife Brooke were just days into their honeymoon when the fire took place.
CCTV captured the vehicle in which the killers fled the scene, travelling north on Forsyth Road in Truganina at approximately 2.12am.

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BBC News
2 minutes ago
- BBC News
Peterborough shop worker threatened with weapons by shoplifters
A convenience store worker has described being threatened with weapons when challenging shoplifters as incidents increase across a county. "I've been threatened with knives, with hockey sticks, every day you're seeing something get worse," said Kieran Essex, 27, who works in a shop in Peterborough. Figures from Cambridgeshire Police show reports of shoplifting have more than doubled over the past five years and Mr Essex said it was a "pandemic". Darryl Preston, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, said work was taking place to tackle the issue. Mr Essex has been working in retail for nine years and said there were now "countless" amounts of said he has experienced "physical contact" with offenders on numerous occasions. "I have had to tackle people at the door, have pursued them outside and have even had people drive off with me inside their car window."He said recently the shop was targeted by shoplifters over four days in a ten-day period."Everyone is just trying to survive," Mr Essex said. In 2020 3,006 shoplifting incidents were recorded by Cambridgeshire Police across the county, this figure rose to 3,161 in 2021, 4,331 in 2022, 6,046 in 2023 and 7,352 in 2024. Vidyut Soni, the owner of Premier City News in Peterborough, has been looking for ways to tackle the problem."It's brazen, not blasé, but brazen. Everything that we sell we have to account for. "We need to find ways to actually make it better, or otherwise it can potentially ruin the whole business."Trade is not easy. Things are very tight in the economy and we don't make much money anyway." Pep Cipriano, the chief executive officer of Peterborough Positive, a business improvement area organisation, said the city was not alone in having rising rates of shoplifting."Shoplifting in Peterborough, like most towns and cities, is on the increase."We work really closely with the police to try and combat it and we've just got the recent announcement about new police officers coming to the city centre... which means on a daily basis we'll see more police on the street." Preston said: "There are ongoing operations taking place to deal with these issues in a concerted way – an example of which would be the 1,600 shoplifting charges brought by [Cambridgeshire Police's] south spree offending team since its creation in September 2023."I continue to fund problem-solving posts in each of our county's community safety partnerships who are working with the police and other partners to tackle shoplifting. "The sharing of local intelligence through schemes such as Shop Watch and the provision of Safer Business packs are both helping to support retailers in preventing, responding and recovering from incidents." Det Ch Insp Christian O'Brien, from Cambridgeshire Police, said: "We are doing everything we can, working with the business community and with the courts."We're... trying to put in place criminal orders to try and prevent the people from committing the offences. "We also work with partner agencies to help the people committing these crimes, because a lot is fuelled by different addictions." Follow Peterborough news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.


The Independent
4 minutes ago
- The Independent
Rape, murder and secret burials: Temple worker's chilling confession shakes holy town
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Driven by guilt, remorse and haunting nightmares, he had returned after more than a decade to expose the 'horrific crimes' he allegedly witnessed during his time working at the temple. According to his testimony and redacted complaint seen by The Independent, the alleged rape, torture and murder of girls and women and the disposal of their remains occurred between 1995 and 2014. The whistleblower demanded exhumation of the hundreds of corpses he claimed to have buried and an investigation so that justice could be ensured for the victims 'who were denied dignity even in death'. His lawyer, KV Dhananjay, told The Independent this was an 'unprecedented' case where the witness had come forward not only with his testimony but also evidence, demanding accountability. 'Here is the individual who says that it is not the fear of law but the fear of conscience and fear for morality that has brought him back,' Dhananjay said. 'In the last 100 years of court judgments, you don't find a parallel.' The emergence of a whistleblower has put the spotlight on hundreds of cases of women and girls who were found dead or reported missing in and around Dharmasthala over the years, many of which were ignored or not formally investigated by police. Nearly two weeks after the man filed his complaint, Karnataka's state government constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into the allegations. Nestled in the lush Western Ghats on the banks of the Nethravathi river, Dharmasthala is a major Hindu pilgrimage site. The medieval Shri Manjunatha Temple, dedicated to the deity Shiva and managed by a family, attracts millions of devotees to the small town every year. The whistleblower said he was from the Dalit community, the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, and worked at the Shri Manjunatha Temple from 1995 to 2014. 'What began as regular employment later turned into work of covering up evidence of extremely horrific crimes,' he alleged. He fled in 2014 when 'the mental torture I was experiencing became unbearable'. The tipping point came after a young girl was sexually harassed, he alleged, prompting him to run away. He and his family went into hiding in a neighbouring state, he claimed, constantly changing residences for fear of their lives. In a chilling first-person account, the man said he found corpses wash up on the riverbank and assumed they were suicides or accidental drownings. But he soon noticed that most of them were women, and many were naked or semi-naked and showed signs of violence. It was in 1998 when he was first asked to "secretly dispose of the bodies", he alleged. When he refused, he was allegedly beaten and threatened. 'We will cut you into pieces. Your body will also be buried like the other corpses. We will sacrifice all your family members,' he alleged he was told. He claimed that many of the victims he ended up burying in secret were minor girls and women subjected to brutal sexual violence. They bore torn clothes, acid burns, and other injuries. In a particularly distressing case in 2010, the man said he was ordered to bury a girl he estimated was 12 to 15 years old. 'She was still wearing her school uniform shirt but other garments were missing. She had a school bag. Her body showed clear signs of sexual assault. There were strangulation marks on her neck,' the whistleblower said in his testimony. 'They instructed me to dig a pit and bury her along with her school bag. That scene remains disturbing to this day.' He also claimed that destitute men were murdered at Dharmasthala and similarly buried. The man alleges that he was a witness to these murders. According to the lawyer, the corpses were not buried in designated cemeteries but on open lands. 'These were not organised interments sanctioned by any authority but random burials, hidden and illegal,' he said. The whistleblower said he kept silent for years out of fear but the 'insurmountable sense of guilt' and recurring nightmares became too much to bear. 'I can no longer bear the burden of memories of the murders I witnessed, the continuous death threats to bury the corpses that I received and the pain of beatings – that if I did not bury those corpses, I would be buried alongside them,' he said. Dhananjay said the whistleblower's claims described a place where 'ordinary laws just don't work at all'. 'Now if it is true, one must assume that if somebody goes missing in such a place, the police are simply not going to record it,' he said. 'But just because we are unable to explain the past, the rocks should not blind us to the present.' The lawyer said the whistleblower took matters into his own hands because he expected little from police. 'Before coming to us, he went to one such burial site, exhumed the remains, and handed them over to the court,' he said. 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Should anything happen to him before he is able to reveal the names, he has said, Dhananjay will open a sealed version of his full testimony. 'The truth about these tragedies must not die with me,' he said in his testimony. Karnataka State Commission for Women chairperson Nagalakshmi Chowdhary told The Independent that the appointment of a Special Investigation Team was a 'significant step'. She referenced the anguish of families still waiting for answers. 'An old woman is still hoping to recover the remains of her daughter just so she can perform her last rites,' she said. 'That's why I wrote to the Karnataka government, and within four or five days they constituted the SIT.' If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call Childline free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331.


The Independent
34 minutes ago
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Lori Vallow Daybell stoked tensions with judge in her Arizona murder conspiracy trials
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