THE brother of the convicted backpacker killer, Ivan Milat, last knight denied on national television he was the accomplice whom police and the trial judge said must also be involved in the brutal serial murders.
But Mr Richard Milat (40) could not say how camping equipment belonging to the last known victims, British travellers Caroline Clarke (21) and Joanne Walters (22), came to be found in his garden shed.
"I can't explain it," said the man, who is one of Milat's 13 brothers and sisters.
The killer, already dubbed Ivan the Terrible, was moved to Maitland maximum security prison, north of Sydney, as the spotlight moved on to who else might have been involved.
In other developments yesterday Ivan Milat's girlfriend, who was brought up in Britain, protested her lover's innocence. It also emerged that the crown's star witness, Mr Paul Onions of Birmingham, could claim the £250,000 reward for helping convict the killer.
There were questions as to why police took so long to link Milat's 1990 attempted robbery of Mr Onions and other attacks on female hitchhikers on the same stretch of the busy Hume Highway, with the backpacker murders.
Seven bodies were all recovered from the Belanglo State Forest, which is just off the highway, 65 miles south west of Sydney, between 1992 and 1993. They had been variously shot, stabbed, bound and gagged and sexually assaulted. One German girl had been decapitated.
On Saturday Milat (51), a road worker, was given seven life sentences after a jury found him guilty of murdering the hitchhikers from the UK, Germany and Melbourne between 1989 and 1992.
During the trial Milat's barrister claimed either Mr Richard Milat, or his brother Walter (44), were probably the killers. In his closing address Mr Terry Martin said even "blind Freddie" could see someone in or very close to the Milat family had committed the crimes.
The crown said at the start of the four month trial that because six of the seven victims were killed in pairs by different weapons, fired from various directions, more than one person was probably involved.
In an extraordinary interview on the 60 minutes programme, Mr Richard Milat rejected court testimony he had told work mates that "stabbing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread".
He denied saying the bodies of two German travellers were still to be found in the forest weeks before they actually were. And he claimed the police had "fitted him up" before with planted evidence.
Ivan Milat's girlfriend, Ms Chalinder Hughes (43), said although she knew he had been charged in the 1970s with rape and armed robbery, she had never asked him to elaborate.
"He wouldn't strike a woman. I feel very comfortable and safe with him," she said. A photograph of Ms Hughes wearing an identical top to one which belonged to Caroline Clarke was produced by the crown during the trial.