Australian police said Monday they had shot dead a man on the run since August, suspected of having killed two police officers, in southeastern Australia.
“A man was fatally shot by police on a property in the north-east of the state of Victoria this morning as part of operations to locate Desmond Freeman,” suspected of having killed two police officers, the police of this Australian state said in a press release, the outcome of one of the most important research operations carried out in the country.
This fifty-year-old fan of conspiracy theories had been wanted since a fatal shooting on August 26 during a search of his home in the small town of Porepunkah, during which two police officers aged 59 and 35 were shot dead. More than 450 police officers were mobilized to find him.
Carrying weapons prohibited in Australia
Shootings are rare in Australia, a country where automatic and semi-automatic weapons have been banned since the deaths of 35 people in 1996 in Tasmania. But the country experienced its deadliest attack in three decades in December 2025, during an anti-Semitic attack in Sydney, during which a father and his son were accused of having opened fire on Bondi Beach during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, 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 came to conduct a search at the home of the man shot dead on Monday. The reason for the search was never specified, but these two police officers belonged to a section of the police responsible for sexual and child abuse offenses and crimes. A third police officer was injured during the shooting.
Australian media described the suspect as a follower of radicalized conspiracy theories, having expressed his hatred towards the police and belonging to the conspiracy movement of “sovereign citizens”, whose members refuse the authority of the state and to submit to the laws.
Appearing in the United States in the 1970s, the “sovereign citizens” movement is spreading today online, particularly on Facebook in groups where activists but also opportunists, seeking for example a way to avoid paying certain bills, rub shoulders.
