Porepunkah, Australia — Australian police said Thursday 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 northeast of Victoria state.
The suspect, identified by police as Dezi Freeman, escaped on foot after opening fire when a team of 10 police arrived at his property on Tuesday, allegedly killing two policemen and wounding a third.
Police say the man — described by local media as a radicalized conspiracy theorist — is heavily armed, has bush survival skills and knows the area well.
"We will not rest until we apprehend the offender," said Russell Barrett, Victoria police deputy commissioner for regional operations.
Police were in contact with the man's partner, had searched a number of properties, and believed he was still in the area, Barrett said.
But "we've had no confirmed sightings," he told a news conference.
Anyone harboring the man would be prosecuted for committing a criminal offense, Barrett warned.
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.
Police say the shooting happened in a matter of minutes when they descended on the man's property on Tuesday morning to execute a search warrant.
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.
Police say 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 whose adherents falsely believe they are not subject to laws passed by the government.
Police have not commented on those reports.
While fighting a speeding penalty in a Melbourne court last year, Freeman referred to police as "frigging Nazis," "Gestapo," and "terrorist thugs," according to a copy of the judge's ruling. Freeman told the court that "even the sight of a cop or a cop car… it's like an Auschwitz survivor seeing a Nazi soldier," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Australia's gun laws and recent history of shootings
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 arrived at a tree-lined property near 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. 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.
Then-newly-elected Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative and close friend of George W. Bush, pushed through the sweeping gun control legislation just 12 days after the shooting.
"The hardest things to do in politics often involve taking away rights and privileges from your own supporters," Howard CBS News' Seth Doane in a 2022 interview, looking back at the landmark legislation.
The new laws banned the sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns; forced people to present a legitimate reason, and wait 28 days, to buy a firearm; and — perhaps most significantly — called for a massive, mandatory gun-buyback. Australia's government confiscated and destroyed close to 700,000 firearms, reducing the number of gun-owning households by half.
"People used to say to me, 'You violated my human rights by taking away my gun,'" Howard recalled. "And I'd tell them: 'I understand that. Will you please understand the argument, the greatest human right of all is to live a safe life without fear of random murder?'"
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