Gunman still at large after Australian police killings

POREPUNKAH, Australia - The Australian police said on Aug 28 they will not rest until they catch a 56-year-old gunman who fled into the bush two days earlier after allegedly killing two officers.

Detectives said they were speaking to the man’s partner and searching rugged, forested terrain near the small town of Porepunkah, in the north-east of Victoria state.

The suspect, identified by police as Dezi Freeman, escaped on foot after opening fire when a team of 10 police officers arrived at his property on Aug 26,

allegedly killing two policemen

and wounding a third.

Police say the man – described by local media as a radicalised conspiracy theorist – is heavily armed, has bush survival skills and knows the area well.

“We will not rest until we apprehend the offender,” said Mr Russell Barrett, Victoria police deputy commissioner for regional operations.

The police were in contact with the man’s partner, had searched a number of properties and believed he was still in the area, Mr Barrett said.

But “we’ve had no confirmed sightings”, he told a news conference.

Anyone harbouring the man would be prosecuted for committing a criminal offence, Mr Barrett warned.

The police said they were moving carefully through the bush, and warned people not to travel into the surrounding alpine area to go skiing.

“It is really difficult terrain. It is complex terrain,” Victoria police superintendent Brett Kahan said.

The police said the shooting happened in a matter of minutes when they descended on the man’s property on the morning of Aug 26 to execute a search warrant.

The police fired at the suspect but apparently did not wound him, they said.

The shootout resulted in the deaths of 59-year-old detective Neal Thompson and 35-year-old senior constable Vadim De Waart.

Challenging manhunt

The police said the wounded officer has undergone surgery and is expected to recover.

Australia’s The Age newspaper said Freeman was a self-professed “sovereign citizen”, referring to a movement that falsely believes it is not subject to laws passed by the government.

Police have not commented on those reports.

While fighting a speeding penalty in a Melbourne court, Freeman referred to police as “frigging Nazis”, “Gestapo”, and “terrorist thugs”, according to a copy of the judge’s ruling in 2024.

Deadly shootings are relatively rare in Australia, and police fatalities even rarer.

The latest deaths listed in a national memorial to fallen police showed three officers were killed on duty in separate incidents in 2023, including one by gunshot.

In December 2022, four police officers arrived at a tree-lined property near the small Queensland town of Wieambilla and came under fire from the family living there.

Six people were killed in that incident, including two police officers. The police later blamed the family’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs for what was termed a terrorist attack.

A ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons has been in place in Australia since a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people. AFP