Warning signs Wieambilla cop killers are set to strike

It was the crime that shocked and horrified Australia and left law enforcement reeling as they investigated whether the ambush and killing of police officers in Wieambilla in Queensland could have been avoided.

There have been demands for answers after four unsuspecting police officers were ambushed in a hail of bullets on December 12, 2022 – shot by brothers Gareth and Nathaniel Train and Gareth’s wife Tracy – while conducting a welfare check on a remote property.

Two officers, Constable Rachel Macrow and Constable Matthew Arnold, were killed in the shooting, while the other two narrowly escaped.

Alan Dare, a neighbor who had visited the property for help after hearing of the commotion, was also killed.

Amid the group’s gathering and stockpiling of firearms and surveillance equipment, they flew under police radar, as the officers in attendance lulled into a false sense of security over the trains’ identity, according to Chief of Police Strategic and Law Enforcement Dr. John Quinn. .

It appears they were targeting someone with no real criminal history. They were teachers in the field of education. Even if you dig a little deeper, you’d assume they went through work with Vulnerable Persons checks, Dr. Quinn said in Under Investigation with Liz Hayes.

“There’s a whole bunch of things here that you can turn around and say this was a low-risk activity.”

Former NSW Homicide Squad Detective Chief Inspector Garry Jobelin said he would have been “comfortable” to have sent his officers overseas on such a job, given the information that was available to the police.

“It’s a fairly straightforward job,” he said on the show, “and they had no sense of what was going to happen around the corner.”

It was later revealed that the Trains had been descending into a Christian fundamentalist mentality obsessed with conspiracy theory for years and believed that the police officers were agents of the “Luciferian Agenda”.

“They came to kill us and we killed them,” Gareth Train said in a video uploaded after the trio killed the police officers.

“If you don’t defend yourself against these devils and demons, then you are a coward.”

The group was anti-vaccination and believed that the Covid-19 pandemic was an attempt at population control by the government and a sign of the impending apocalypse.

Despite the fact that the group was a teacher, a profession that didn’t set off alarm bells with the police, their belief in conspiracy theories was an indication that something was amiss with the group.

“We like to believe that [conspiracy theorists are] “An uneducated person or a certain kind of person, but that really came through in our fear centers, it could be anyone else,” said psychologist Tamara Cavnett.

“What we do know is someone who believes one conspiracy will believe another conspiracy, and they’ve been adding hate and more and more about conspiracy theories into the mix.”

However, just because the trains had strange beliefs, it wasn’t necessarily indicative of the violent crimes they would later commit, according to Ms. Cavnett.

“We don’t have a clear predictor of who will and won’t [descend into violence]She said.

“You can look at individuals and you can look at the history of violence, and that will predict the future of violence… But we know that just believing in any set of beliefs, any set of ideologies is not predictive at all.”

Dr Quinn said the event is a warning sign to law enforcement that this type of terrorism could pose a deadly threat to Australians, with similar attacks likely in the future.

It is a threat to national security. I believe that right-wing extremism, conspiracy theories and sovereign citizens are a direct threat to social cohesion in Australian societies and continue to do so.