The Australian police stated on Monday that they shot dead a man who had been on the run since August, suspected of killing two police officers in southeastern Australia.
” A man was fatally shot by the police on a property in the northeast of the state of Victoria this morning as part of the operations to locate Desmond Freeman, suspected of killing two police officers,” the police of this Australian state said in a statement following one of the largest search operations carried out in the country.
The fifty-year-old conspiracy theorist had been wanted since a deadly shooting on August 26 during a raid at his home in the small town of Porepunkah, where two police officers, aged 59 and 35, were shot dead. More than 450 police officers were mobilized to find him.
Armed attacks are rare in Australia, a country where automatic and semi-automatic weapons have been banned since 1996 after the death of 35 people in Tasmania. However, the country experienced its deadliest attack in three decades in December 2025, during an anti-Semitic attack in Sydney, where a father and son are accused of opening fire on Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people.
The two police officers killed in August in the state of Victoria, Neal Thompson and Vadim De Waart, were part of a team of ten officers who were conducting a raid at the home of the man shot dead on Monday. The reason for the raid was never specified, but these two officers belonged to a police unit responsible for sexual and pedocriminal offenses. A third officer was injured in the shootout.
Australian media described the suspect as a radicalized conspiracy theorist who expressed his hatred towards the police and belonged to the conspiracy movement of “sovereign citizens,” whose members reject the authority of the state and refuse to abide by laws.
Originating in the United States in the 1970s, the “sovereign citizens” movement is now spreading online, particularly on Facebook in groups where activists mingle with opportunists seeking ways to avoid paying certain bills.
