KEY POINTS:
The name of the street in Mt Roskill that was home to Nai Yin Xue, his wife An An Liu and their 3-year-old daughter Qian Xun Xue could scarcely have been more bitterly ironic. Keystone Ave was assuredly not named after the comically incompetent Keystone Cops of the
silent-era slapstick films. But the police operation that began after little Qian Xun was discovered, alone and crying, in Melbourne's Southern Cross railway station on Saturday morning invites comparison with the bumbling oafs of the silver screen.
No one seeing the closed-circuit television footage of the now-fugitive Nai Yin Xue bending down to whisper in Qian Xun's ear before walking away without so much as a backward glance could fail to be deeply affected by it. What is plain is that a young girl, whose mother is dead and whose father has abandoned her, is the victim of the most heart-rending family tragedy. But what is equally plain is that there are very important questions to be asked about the conduct of the investigation.
The inescapable arithmetic of international travel - the time taken to get from the station in Melbourne's Docklands to the airport, check in, board and fly from Melbourne to Los Angeles - argues that at least a dozen and as many as 16 hours elapsed between the time Qian Xun was discovered and the time Xue touched down in California. It would have been a superhuman police effort indeed that identified the girl - who was carrying no documents - and established her father's onward travel plans in time to intercept him when he landed at LAX. Nobody can fairly criticise the police for their failure to manage that. But elsewhere the investigation seems to have been characterised by a lumbering attention to the niceties of procedure that is hard to tell apart from inertia.
Most concern centres on the car outside the Keystone Ave address in which the body of An An Liu was found on Wednesday. The police have defended the time that it took to open the car's boot on the grounds that they needed to get a search warrant - "It's not just a matter of breaking the windows and getting in," said Detective Sergeant Simon Scott. He also said the delay between getting the warrant and executing it was necessary so that staff new to the inquiry could be "brought up to speed".
But none of this goes anywhere near explaining why the car remained outside the police cordon - to be touched and leant on by anyone who passed by - right through the period when the warrant was being sought. Even assuming that the obtaining of the warrant was a cumbersome legal process - and warrants have been issued in short order by Justices of the Peace in circumstances much less serious than this - why was such scant care taken of a car, plainly festooned with Chinese writing, outside the house of a Chinese woman for whose safety police said they held grave fears. A police spokeswoman's claim that "we don't just go busting into things" and "we have to make sure any evidence is not going to be contaminated" seems more than a little wan.
Many other matters cause concern, among them the five-day delay before US authorities were requested to look for the fugitive, and the fact that it is possible for a man to leave the country with his daughter even though court orders were in force banning him from having any contact with her.
Outright condemnation of police and others' conduct is certainly ill-advised and may yet turn out to be unfair. It may transpire that the case raises questions about whether the police are adequately resourced to deal with cases within immigrant communities where cultural and language barriers stand in the way of easy resolution. But the case of little Qian Xun will require a lot of work long after what happened to her mother and father has been explained.