Group to fight Vic lethal ecstasy charges

A group of men will fight charges they trafficked a lethal batch of party drugs linked to the deaths of three people in Melbourne.

Daniele Marchei, Tuan Van Pham, Terry Trinh Ostojic and Thinh Yen appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday via videolink, charged with trafficking a commercial quantity of drugs.

The men will fight the charges at a committal hearing in June that will examine the police investigation into the drugs responsible for the deaths of three people who took ecstasy in 2017.

A sixth man, 35-year-old Nghi Le, has also been charged with trafficking the same batch of drugs, as well as three counts of attempted murder after shots were fired at police during a raid on a St Albans home in February 2017.

The defence will cross-examine police about 51,000 phone taps and translations of phone conversations as part of a five-day committal hearing beginning on June 25.

Marchei, an Italian national, and Pham, Ostojic and Yen, have been in custody since their February 2017 arrest, following a police investigation into a batch of MDMA linked to the deaths of three revellers in Melbourne, and overdoses in Queensland, WA and the ACT.

It's alleged the pills the men trafficked were a combination of two drugs, 4-fluoroamphetamine (4-FA) and 25C-NBOMe, that were sold as MDMA.