Police and SES volunteers work their way through dense bushland at Beerwah on Queensland's Sunshine Coast in the ongoing search for the remains of Daniel Morcombe.
Police and SES volunteers work their way through dense bushland at Beerwah
on Queensland's Sunshine Coast in the ongoing search for the remains of Daniel Morcombe. Photo: Queensland Police Service

A preliminary forensic analysis has confirmed that three bones found at the Sunshine Coast search site for Daniel Morcombe's remains are human.

Further DNA tests over the next few days will find if they are from the body of the Queensland teenager who has been missing since 2003.

The bones were discovered today close to where a second shoe was found yesterday in the primary search site at the end of Kings Road at Beerwah in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.


Police continue to caution that the discovery of these bones and two shoes at the search site may be unrelated to the current investigation. The possible breakthrough comes as more than 100 state emergency service personnel, 12 police and other community group volunteers spent the weekend scouring the Beerwah site.
 
Yesterday searchers found another shoe that is thought to match one found last Wednesday and which have been be submitted for scientific tests. The search, which began when Brett Peter Cowan, 41, was arrested and charged with Daniel's murder a week ago, will move into its ninth day tomorrow. But police will be joined by fewer SES volunteers as those who helped across the weekend return to work.

Meanwhile, it was revealed today that undercover police spent months in a Perth caravan park surveilling Cowan.

The accused had no idea almost every second of his life was being monitored by detectives who were living just metres from him at Crystal Brook Caravan Park, The Sunday-Mail reported.

The former truck driver, who often walked around with a parrot on his shoulder, reportedly acted as an unofficial handyman for older residents in the park, before heading to Queensland in early August.

Daniel was 13 when he disappeared while waiting for a bus under a Sunshine Coast overpass in 2003, sparking Queensland's highest-profile missing-child case.

 with AAP