WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Oct 6, (AP): Police in Western Australia have seized guns and revoked or suspended firearms permits from dozens of owners linked to what investigators describe as sovereign citizen ideologies, or views that reject government authority. Officials linked the crackdown on firearms users believed to hold such views to the fatal shooting in August of two police officers in Victoria state, in the country's east.

The suspect in those killings, 56-year-old Dezi Freeman, remains at large, weeks after he is said to have killed two officers visiting his rural property to serve a search warrant. In the years before the shooting, Freeman appeared to have embraced so-called sovereign citizen views during court appearances. Members of such movements use debunked legal theories to reject government authority.

Freeman is suspected of killing Detective Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart and wounding a third officer. Following the shooting, investigators in Western Australia used bolstered gun laws enacted in 2024 to identify weapons owners in their state who they said held similar views to Freeman’s.

"The mission of this operation was simple and that was to validate and verify our intelligence on who may hold sovereign citizen ideologies here in Western Australia,” the state’s Police Commissioner Col Blanch told reporters on Sunday. Social media posts and information from other gun owners was used to identify those targeted.

Officers visited 70 properties over five days in late September and early October, seizing 135 firearms and suspending or revoking 44 gun licenses, Blanch said. Investigators relied on a legal provision that allows only someone who meets the standard of a "fit and proper person” to hold a gun permit. "If you have made it very clear that you do not abide by the laws of Western Australia, set by the Parliament, then there is no way that you can be a fit and proper person,” Blanch said.

In explaining the raids, Blanch said that in the past three years, six police officers in four states have been shot dead by members of the public, which he said was "unprecedented” in Australia. In 2022, two officers were shot and killed by Christian extremists at a rural property in Queensland state. The three shooters in that case - conspiracy theorists who reportedly hated the police - were shot and killed by officers after a six-hour siege in the region of Wieambilla.