Man Arrested Over Missing Irish Woman

Australian police searching for missing Irish woman Gillian Meagher have arrested a 41-year-old man.

Homicide officers made the arrest in a suburb of Melbourne on Thursday.

A brief statement said the man was assisting officers with their inquiries at a police station in the city.

No charges have yet been laid.

Detectives had been wanting to talk to a man in a blue-hooded jumper seen on CCTV images with Ms Meagher moments before she vanished in the early hours of last Saturday.

Local media reports suggest the person arrested is the man in the picture, although this has not been confirmed by police.

Detectives are concerned that Ms Meagher, a 29-year-old who moved from Ireland to the city three years ago, was abducted while walking home alone from a bar in the Brunswick area.

She works for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and had been for drinks with colleagues.

A number of members of the public were also seen on the CCTV footage and one of those filmed has now come forward.

"I told the police he was just a nondescript-looking guy," Brunswick resident Dan Gregson told the Fairfax newspaper group when asked about the man in the hooded top.

"There was nothing strange about him or I would have noticed."

Ms Meagher left the bar at around 1.30am saying she would walk alone the short distance to her flat.

But police say she never completed the five-minute journey to the apartment she shares with her husband, Thomas, who is not being treated as a suspect.

In the CCTV footage, the man in the hoodie walks back and forth, speaks briefly to Ms Meagher for about 30 seconds, and then walks off ahead of her.

She then speaks to her brother on her mobile for two minutes, walks out of view of the camera and has not been seen since.

Police would not confirm that additional CCTV footage shows the same unknown man running towards Ms Meagher, or a witness report that a car had performed a U-turn towards her.