Wellington, New Zealand (AP) – The Police in Western Australia has seized weapons and firearms revoked or suspended from dozens of owners linked to what investigators describe as sovereign citizen ideologies, or opinions that reject government authority.
The officials linked the repression against users of firearms that are believed to have such opinions about the fatal shooting in August of two police officers in the state of Victoria, in the east of the country. The suspect of these murders, Dezi Freeman, 56, remains in general, weeks after it is said that he killed two officers visiting his rural property to fulfill a search warrant.
In the years before the shooting, Freeman seemed to have embraced the so -called opinions of sovereign citizens during the apparitions in court. Members of such movements use discredited legal theories to reject government authority.
The arms owners had their canceled permits on their views
It is suspected that Freeman kills the detective to the senior student Neal Thompson and the Senior Vadim agent of Waart-Hotart and wounded a third officer. After the shooting, researchers in Western Australia used reinforced weapons laws in 2024 to identify arms owners in their state, who, according to them, had similar opinions to Freeman.
“The mission of this operation was simple and it was to validate and verify our intelligence on who can have sovereign citizen ideologies here in Western Australia,” said the State Police Commissioner Col Blanch on Sunday. Publications were used on social networks and information from other arms owners to identify the directions.
The officers visited 70 properties for five days at the end of September and early October, seizing 135 firearms and suspending or revoking 44 arms licenses, said Blanch. The researchers were based on a legal provision that allows someone to comply with the standard of an “adequate and adequate person” to maintain a weapons permit.
“If it has made it very clear that it will not comply with the laws of Western Australia, established by Parliament, then there is no way that it can be an adequate and adequate person,” said Blanch.
Lias caused by shooting deaths of 6 Australian officers
When explaining the raids, Blanch said that in the last three years, six police officers in four states were shot dead by members of the public, which said he had no precedents “in Australia.
In 2022, two officers were shot dead by Christian extremists in a rural property in the state of Queensland. The three shooters in that case, the theorists of the conspiracy that, according to the reports, hated the police, were shot dead by officers after a siege of six hours in the Wieambilla region.
A South Australian police officer was shot dead in 2023. Another was killed in Tasmania in June.
Shoe deaths in Australia are rare. A 1996 massacre in the city of Port Arthur in Tasmania, where a lonely armed man killed 35 people, led the government to drastically tighten the arms laws and made it very difficult for Australians to acquire firearms.
When the most strict arms laws of Western Australia were enacted last June, the state government boasted that they were the strongest in the country. The changes included limiting the number of weapons that someone can have 10 for most people.
Six weeks later, Victoria’s police killer continues
Meanwhile, in the Rural Victoria, the largest tactical police operation in Australia continues the search for Freeman. Hundreds of officers have crossed resistant landscapes, tight in caves and reviewed the axes of the mine, without confirmed sightings of the fugitive so far.
The murders of August 26 occurred when 10 armed police officers tried to execute a search warrant in Freeman’s property in Porepunkah, a city of just over 1,000 people located 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of the city of Melbourne.
The suspect, Freeman, fled alone, on foot and strongly armed, in dense surrounding forest. He has experience in desert survival skills, authorities said.
Victoria Police Commissioner Mike Bush did not offer a reason for the search for Freeman’s property at that time, but told reporters that the officers who attended included members of a unit investigating sexual crimes and child abuse.
The Australian media widely reported that Freeman defended the beliefs of sovereign citizens, citing a 2021 video taken in the Wangaratta magistrates and published online in which you can see without success to arrest a magistrate and police officers during an audience.
In a 2024 finding of the Supreme Court of Victoria, where Freeman tried to challenge a long suspension of his driver’s license, a judge wrote that the man had “a history of unpleasant meetings with police officers” who referred to his presentations before the court as “Nazis” and “terrorist Thugs”.
(Tagstotranslate) Western Australia (T) Dezi Freeman (T) Police officers