The Australia-Western police conduct a repression of firearms belonging to the members of the “sovereign citizen” movement, an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of the government.
A person who would have such points of view is sought for the murder of two police officers from the State of Victoria in August.
The suspect in these murders is a 56 -year -old man known as Dezi Freeman, well known on Australian social media as a conspiracy theorist and antigenmental activist. His imprint on social networks increased considerably during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
According to his neighbors, Freeman – born under the name of Desmond Christopher Filby – began to adopt more extreme views and behavior after locking of coronavirus and behavior codes imposed by the government.
“He was anti-everything to do with that”, local knowledge recalled. “He went from a fairly ordinary country guy – a normal guy that you would see at the local football club all the time – a fairly strange guy. He fell a little a rabbit hole and somehow disappeared, and came out of the radar.”
Freeman has become, to put it slightly, a frank critic of the government and the police and found his way in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which rejects the legitimacy of the government at almost all levels. The followers of this philosophy are subject to measures such as the refusal to pay taxes and to disobey the police because they believe that the government does not have the power to tax them or give them orders.
Freeman had a long history of minor offenses, mainly made up of driving wonders, before degenerating to more alarming behavior after the pandemic. Once upon a time he ordered the police to arrest a judge during a court hearing for access to national parks, and when the police officer refused, Freeman said he was also in arrest.
In December 2021, Freeman carried a legal case Against the Prime Minister of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, for “betrayal” for his allegedly authoritarian actions during the pandemic. The case was quickly thrown outside the court, but some of the freeman fans of Freeman accused Police persecute Freeman because his betrayal file against Andrews were about to move forward.
One of the reasons for the persistence of this conspiracy theory is that when Freeman was decree To illegally protest outside the courthouse in 2021, he told his supporters that the government “was going to do swets” about him to justify the silence or kill him.
Ten police officers were sent to the property of Freeman near the rural city of Porepunkah on August 26 to execute a search warrant. Details of the mandate were not made public, but several of the officers were members of the survey team on sexual offenses and children. Freeman lived on the property on a bus with his wife Amalia and two of their three children.
Freeman resisted the search warrant, leading to an altercation between him, Amalia and the police. During the argument, one of the police officers would have tried to enter the residence and the well -armed Freeman opened fire. Two officers were killed and a third was injured, after which Freeman and his wife leak the property.
Amalia Freeman and her teenage son were decree And released a few days later, but Dezi Freeman remains in freedom in the Australian bush, despite his wife’s calls to go. It is the subject of one of the The biggest oak In the history of Australia, with hundreds of local and federal police officers involved, supported by the Australian army.
The public was warned To stay away from the area where Freeman could hide, although these restrictions have been relaxed over the weeks, without reported observations. Freeman’s brother, James Filby, said On Monday, he thinks that Dezi died a death “cold, lonely and frightening” while hiding in the desert, but the police have not yet canceled research, and some believe that the skills of the fugitive as Bushman could keep it alive and hidden.
With the fate of Unknown Freeman, official attention turned to the sovereign citizen movement. Friday, police from Australia-Western (WA) announcement The conclusion of an operation at the level of the State to confiscate firearms of at least 70 people associated with the movement. 135 cannons were seized in the operation and 44 firearms licenses were suspended.
“The recent murder of two police officers on duty in the Victoria country would have been committed by a sovereign citizen. After this tragedy, I asked my officers to examine and assess the risks of people in Australia-Western who are licensed firearms license and whose beliefs align with the sovereign ideology of citizens “, Col Blanch.
Whiten said The operation, which was carried out over five days from the end of September, was intended to “validate and verify our information on which could hold sovereign citizen ideologies here in Australia-Western”.
Blanch noted that if the Freeman case has drawn national attention, six police officers in four states have been killed by public members in the past three years. Australia generally has laws on firearms and WA has announced that it had imposed “the strongest” firearms in the country last year.
“If you have clearly indicated that you do not respect the laws of Western Australia, established by Parliament, there is no way you can be a person in shape and appropriate,” he said.
Police Minister Reece Whitby said that sovereign citizens “oppose the laws that are the cornerstone of a free and democratic community, which has the potential to threaten public security”.
