Police in Australia are continuing their search for an armed man who is still on the run a day after he allegedly killed two officers and wounded a third.
Officers had searched through the night for the man who fled on foot after a shootout yesterday morning in the northeast of Victoria state.
They have deployed "every resource" to find him, police said, setting up a wide cordon around the crime scene, a rural property with a house and a bus in the small town of Porepunkah.
"The suspect for this horrific event is still at large," Victoria police chief commissioner Mike Bush told a news conference.
"I can assure everyone that we are pouring every resource into this search for this person," he added.
"He is very dangerous. He's killed two police officers and injured a third," he said.
Education officials closed the local primary school during the manhunt.
Police said they had spoken with the man's partner and children to ensure they were safe and to rule out any hostage situation.
They believe the suspect has multiple "powerful" firearms, Mr Bush said.
Ten police officers arrived at the property yesterday morning to execute a search warrant when gunfire broke out, the police chief said.
Police "did discharge shots in his direction" during the shootout, apparently without wounding the gunman, Mr Bush said.
The incident, which occurred "over minutes", resulted in the deaths of a 59-year-old detective and a 35-year-old senior constable.
Challenging manhunt
The wounded officer has been operated on and is "significantly damaged" but will recover, the police chief said.
The man managed to flee the scene on foot despite officers giving chase, he said.
While not revealing the cause for the search warrant, Mr Bush said the police team that went to the property included local officers.
The manhunt is challenging, he said, explaining that the suspect was believed to understand "bushcraft" - surviving in nature - and "he will know that area better than us".
Australia's The Age newspaper said the man was a self-professed "sovereign citizen", referring to a movement that falsely believes it is not subject to laws passed by the government.
Police declined to comment on those reports.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the man's sovereign citizen beliefs remained allegations but the ideology and far-right extremism were a concern.
Australia's intelligence services had warned that the sovereign citizen movement posed a "very real" threat, he told national broadcaster ABC.
The prime minister recalled that he had attended the funerals of police killed by gunfire in December 2022 near the small Queensland town of Wieambilla.
Four police officers came under gunfire when they arrived at a tree-lined property in that incident. Six people were killed, including two police officers.
Deadly shootings are relatively rare in Australia, with 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.
A ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons has been in place since a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people.
Accreditation: AFP
