Wieambilla cop shooting officially labelled ‘terrorism’
Two police officers and a neighbour murdered at Wieambilla were shot in a “religiously motivated terrorist attack”, Deputy Police Commissioner Tracy Linford has confirmed.
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Two police officers and a neighbour murdered at Wieambilla were shot in a “religiously motivated terrorist attack”, Deputy Police Commissioner Tracy Linford says.
The murdered Queensland Police officers were among four who walked into an ambush at a property outside Chinchilla on the Western Downs in December while looking for former school principal Nathaniel Train, who had been reported missing in country NSW.
Constables Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, were shot dead, along with bystander Alan Dare, 58.
Constables Randall Kirk and Keely Brough, both 28, escaped.
The officers and Mr Dare were murdered by Gareth Train, his wife Stacey, a former school principal, and Gareth’s brother, Nathaniel.
They killed Mr Dare, shooting him in the back from about 150m away, after he heard shooting and saw black smoke from a burning police car the Trains had lit on fire.
The Trains were later shot dead by police after a stand-off with officers from the Special Emergency Response Team.
Ms Linford on Thursday said an examination of the trio’s lives – including Stacey Train’s diary – had found they were “religious extremists”.
She said an extensive investigation has found the Trains subscribed to Premillennialism – they believed Christ would return to earth for a period of 1000 days after a period of widespread destruction.
The deputy commissioner also said investigators did not believe the Trains were sovereign citizens – a term for a people who generally hold anti-government views and believe they are not subject to the laws of their country.
“Some of the behaviour of the Train family members was similar to what you’d see from sovereign citizen members,” she said.
“But in all the examination of the material, we can’t find anywhere where those three Train family members declare themselves as sovereign citizens.”
Investigators had pored over several documents and taken hundreds of statements since the December 12 ambush, Ms Linford said.
“I can tell you we have now had opportunity to go through many, many documents – one of those being a diary that Stacey Train maintained. We’ve had an opportunity to go through all the phone messages, texts, emails, the social media postings,” she said.
“I can tell you our investigators at this point in time have taken over 190 statements or recorded interviews. We’ve gone through body worn camera footage and also CCTV.
“All of that analysis has provided us significant information about what drove the motivation of the Train family members on that day.
“And our assessment has concluded that Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train acted as an autonomous cell and executed a religiously motivated terrorist attack.”
Ms Linford said the Trains held a Christian-based extremist belief system.
“What we’ve been able to glean from that information was that the Train family members subscribed to what we’ll call a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system known as Premillennialism,” she said.
“It’s a belief system that comes from Christian theology.
“In its basic interpretation, is that there is a belief that Christ will return to the earth for 1000 days and provide peace and prosperity but it will be preceded by a period of time of tribulation, widespread destruction and suffering.”
The Trains also had a hatred for police, according to Ms Linford.
“We can see they do see the police as monsters and demons,” she said.
“There was significant evidence of advanced preparation and planning (for the attack).”
She said that included camouflage hides where “one of the three members would lie in wait”, as well as “multiple erected barriers” that were dirt mounds, logs and even steel barriers.
Security and counter-terrorism teams were among the police units to examine the motivations for the killings.
Ms Linford said police in Queensland had spoken with Federal Bureau of Investigation officers in the US about an online associate of the Trains.
“We’ve personally met with the FBI, we’ve handed over material that was … of interest to them,” she said.
Other members of the Train family had also been interviewed by police.
“We’ve taken statements from a range of the Train family members and maintained contact with them. That has been very helpful,” the commissioner said.
“It helped us glean a lot of information about their ideology, their religious ideology.”
Ms Linford added police had also looked into whether the Trains were suffering from a mental illness.
“When you’ve got three acting together, it’s challenging to say that it’s a mental health issue in this instance,” she said.
She reiterated the attack had been planned for some time, saying mirrors had been hung around the property to alert the Trains to strangers on their land.
“We can see well worn tracks between the hides, so that gives us an indication that it wasn’t something they had just done,” she said.
Ms Linford said there was also a record of the Trains purchasing ammunition “many months before the attack occurred” but that was not unusual on rural properties.
“They had radios, we even located a trap door under the house which might have enabled an easy escape,” she said.
“But I want to stress there is absolutely no evidence at this time that there is anyone else in Australia that participated or assisted in this attack. We are not looking for anyone else in Australia.
“Now Christian extremist ideology has been linked to other attacks around the world but this is the first time we’ve seen it occur in Australia.
“Probably the one people most might recognise was the Waco attack, I think that was back in about 1993 in the United States.”
The Waco, Texas siege began when US authorities attempted to serve a search and arrest warrant at a compound belonging to a religious sect called the Branch Davidians.
Eighty-six people died after a shootout, a siege lasting 51 days and a fire at the end of the saga.
The Branch Davidians’ beliefs were based on a prophecy of an apocalypse and the defeat of “evil armies”, according to online articles.
Ms Linford said Intelligence units created profiles of each of the Trains and made a timeline of everything they did in the months before the murders.
The trio had constructed makeshift “sniper hides” around their property and stashed ammunition in them.
They dressed in camouflage gear and had trail cameras among the trees that sent them notifications when movement was detected.
Nathaniel, 46, had left the NSW school where he was principal after suffering a heart attack, and later broke through a NSW-QLD border gate in a Covid-19 breach in which he dumped his car and guns.
He was reported missing by his wife in NSW after he crossed the border and headed to the Wieambilla home owned by his brother Gareth, 47, and his wife Stacey, 45.
Police had been to the property several times on previous occasions trying to find Nathaniel to ask him about the illegal border crossing.
When police went there in December they had a warrant to serve on Nathaniel, a licensed firearms holder, for wilful damage and failing to secure firearms relating to the border breach.
Gareth was a doomsday conspiracy theorist with a hatred of police.
The former school groundskeeper was also a prolific poster on conspiracy web sites.
His posts included beliefs that the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania was an inside job and Princess Diana was killed in 1997 in a “blood sacrifice”.
In a chilling post, Gareth also spoke about previous confrontations with officers who were “cowards”.
“I have directed law enforcement to leave my premises over the last 20 years, having no reason or grounds and at times have also asked them to remove their hands from their weapons or pull their pistols and whistle Dixie (sic),” he wrote.
“Fortunately for me they have all been cowards.
“Our country is at a point where even cowards are now dangerous because they are unpredictable in groups, turn your back and you may find yourself out cold on the floor with law enforcement dancing on your head. We are seeing this in Victoria.”
Gareth also posted about the Port Arthur massacre on other websites, claiming mass shooter Martin Bryant was the “perfect patsy”, that the shooting was a “false flag” operation and was a “government psy-op massacre (sic)”.
He also wrote anti-vaccination posts and claimed “chemical agents were deployed over populated areas at altitude, drifted 100s of kms”.
Ms Linford said when the Trains said “See you when we get home” in a video they posted online the night of the shootings, investigators believed they were talking about heaven.
She said it was possible that the Trains posting videos on social media could have been in an attempt to inspire others.
“There is commentary in there that they’re talking about that the ‘war is coming’, that kind of thing,” she said.
“I don’t think they were trying to usher it in, I think they just saw that it was happening. “They perceived that was happening and as a consequence they started preparing for the ‘end of days’. There is a lot of rhetoric around the ‘end of days’.”
Ms Linford said the three Trains appeared to be “equally aligned” in their religious views when asked if there was a leader in the group.
She said the trio had made interpretations of the various iterations of the Bible.
“What we can see is where they’ve actually labelled a script from a Bible and made notations around that,” she said.
“And there is multiple places where they have done that.”
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