at 20:39 on January 3, 2007, EST.

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Australian officials have handed the video of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin's fatal encounter with a stingray to his family and destroyed any remaining copies to prevent the grisly footage from being made public, a state coroner said Thursday.

Queensland State Coroner Michael Barnes said police gave the original film of Irwin's death to his wife, Terri, in late December and that all copies of the tape, which was shot during the filming of a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, had been destroyed.

"The footage has been the subject of widespread media interest and it was wholly appropriate that we took all possible steps to ensure something of such a personal and tragic nature did not fall into the wrong hands," Barnes said in a statement. "This is in line with the wishes of the Irwin family."

Police made the copies of the video to assist with their investigation into the cause of Irwin's death.

An earlier report in News Ltd. newspapers quoted Barnes as saying that police had warned him the footage could fall into the hands of pay-per-view Internet operators, possibly fetching as much as one million Australian dollars (C$885,000) a copy. He did not elaborate on whether specific requests had been made, and refused to comment further on the allegations.

In the age of popular Internet video sharing networks YouTube and My Space, speculation had been rife that footage of Irwin's death could eventually be made public. But in an interview with U.S. television last September, Terri Irwin, of Eugene, Ore., said the video should never see the light of day.

"What purpose would that serve?" Terri Irwin said in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, adding that she herself had not seen the video.

Irwin, 44, died on Sept. 4 after being stabbed in the chest by a stingray's poisonous barb while filming a documentary near the northeastern city of Port Douglas in his home state of Queensland.


©The Canadian Press, 2007

It is like seeing those beheading videos from the war, it serves no purpose but human curiousity

poor Terri