TWO police officers shot dead in the Australian bush in an execution style bloodbath were killed by a former teacher and his conspiracy theorist brother.
Australian cops Rachel McCrow, 26, and 29-year-old Matthew Arnold were gunned down in a shootout with Nathaniel Train, his brother Gareth and Gareth’s wife, Stacey Train.
The two constables were part of a team of four officers looking for Nathanial Train at a property in a remote part of Queensland after his family reported him missing.
McCrow and Arnold honked their horn to alert the residents of the house near Wieambilla of their presence.
But when there was no sign of anyone inside, the four officers got out of their cars and jumped over the locked fence.
They then came under a hail of gunfire from inside as they walked up the driveway at about 4pm local time on Monday.
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The bullets that descended on the four officers are believed to have been fired by Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train.
After the officers were shot the gunmen dressed in camouflage fired further bullets into their bodies then took their guns.
A neighbour who ran to investigate, Alan Dare, 58, was killed in crossfire
Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train were killed in a subsequent gunfight with Special Operations officers.
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It’s emerged that Gareth Train was a conspiracy theorist who hated cops and believed an infamous Australian massacre was a “false flag operation”, according to The Guardian.
He claimed the Port Arthur Massacre was designed to “disarm the Australian population” and bizarrely asserted the government was running “re-education camps”.
The officers killed were responding to a request from their New South Wales counterparts in the search for Nathaniel.
Two other police officers Constable Keely Brough and Constable Randall Kirk, both aged 28, also came under fire but managed to escape.
Kirk was shot in the leg while Brough fled into the bush pursued by the gunmen.
Locals reported sporadic gunfire throughout the night, culminating in an intense firefight in which the three shooters were killed.
Queensland police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, said there had been “a lot of ammunition and weaponry” at the property and that the dead officers “did not stand a chance”.
The 46-year-old was last seen on December 16, 2021 but was still in contact with family members until October 9 this year.
He was a former school principal in Queensland’s far north until a heart attack and a cheating row, the Daily Mail reports.
One student, who may have been related to a teaching assistant, was unable to answer the first two questions in a test but then got all of the remaining 34 questions correct.
Train allegedly raised the alarm about the incident at his own school but sought help from a politician when he claimed the NSW Education Department had ignored him.
Train kept pursuing the cheating row with education officials in a series of increasingly frustrated emails.
He suffered a massive heart attack at the school in August last year. and was saved by teachers who rushed to his aid.
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Stacey Train was listed as the Head of Curriculum at nearby Tara Shire State College as recently as 2019.
She was also the representative of the Western Downs branch of the Queensland teachers union.
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