Police in Western Australia have seized guns and revoked or suspended firearms permits from dozens of owners linked to what investigators describe as sovereign citizen ideologies, or views that reject government authority.
Officials linked the crackdown on firearms users believed to hold such views to the fatal shooting in August of two police officers in Victoria state, in the country’s east. The suspect in the Aug. 26 killings, 56-year-old Dezi Freeman, remains at large, weeks after he is said to have killed two officers visiting his rural property to serve a search warrant.
In the years before the shooting, Freeman appeared to have embraced so-called sovereign citizen views during court appearances. Members of such movements use debunked legal theories to reject government authority.
Photo: AFP
Freeman is suspected of killing Detective Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart, and wounding a third officer. Following the shooting, investigators in Western Australia used bolstered gun laws enacted last year to identify weapons owners in their state who they said held similar views to Freeman’s.
“The mission of this operation was simple and that was to validate and verify our intelligence on who may hold sovereign citizen ideologies here in Western Australia,” state Police Commissioner Col Blanch told reporters on Sunday.
Social media posts and information from other gun owners was used to identify those targeted.
Officers visited 70 properties over five days late last month and early this month, seizing 135 firearms and suspending or revoking 44 gun licenses, Blanch said.
Investigators relied on a legal provision that allows only someone who meets the standard of a “fit and proper person” to hold a gun permit.
“If you have made it very clear that you do not abide by the laws of Western Australia, set by the parliament, then there is no way that you can be a fit and proper person,” Blanch said.
In explaining the raids, Blanch said that in the past three years, six police officers in four states have been shot dead by members of the public, which he said was “unprecedented” in Australia.
In 2022, two officers were shot and killed by Christian extremists at a rural property in Queensland state. The three shooters in that case — conspiracy theorists who reportedly hated the police — were shot and killed by officers after a six-hour siege in the region of Wieambilla.
A South Australia police officer was shot dead in 2023. Another was killed in Tasmania in June.
Shooting deaths in Australia are otherwise rare. A 1996 massacre in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, where a lone gunman killed 35 people, prompted the government to drastically tighten gun laws and made it much more difficult for Australians to acquire firearms.
Meanwhile, in rural Victoria, Australia’s largest ever tactical police operation continues the search for Freeman.
Hundreds of officers have traversed rugged landscapes, squeezed into caves and checked mine shafts, with no confirmed sightings of the fugitive so far.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS