An Arizona man has been arrested in connection with the shooting in Australia

An Arizona man has been arrested in the United States in connection with a shooting in rural Australia Last year, two police officers and a bystander were killed, the FBI and police in the Australian state of Queensland said on Wednesday.

The arrest was announced at 6 p.m joint press conference in Brisbane, Australia, by the two agencies. They have not released the man’s name, but a federal indictment made public in the United States later on Wednesday charged Donald Day Jr., 58, with two counts of interstate threatening, accusing him of making videos related to the shooting and posting. them on YouTube.

At the news conference on Wednesday, Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Cheryl Scanlon described the shooting as a “religiously motivated terror attack” and said Australian investigators had been working on the case in the United States.

According to the indictment, four police officers went to a remote property in the Queensland town of Wieambilla on December 12, 2022, to investigate a report of a missing person. The officers were shot at, it said, and two of them were killed.

According to Australian authorities, a married couple living on the property, Gareth and Stacey Train, and Mr. Train’s brother, Nathaniel Train, killed the two officers, Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, as well as a neighbor, Alan. To dare. The three trains were killed in a shootout with police.

The Trains subscribed to a “Christian fundamentalist belief system known as premillennialism” and saw police officers as “monsters and demons”, Queensland Police Assistant Commissioner Tracy Linford said earlier this year.

Ms Scanlon said Gareth Train Mr. Day in 2020 began following him on YouTube, and the two began commenting on each other’s videos the following year.

In 2021 and 2022, Mr Day repeatedly sent messages containing what Ms Scanlon described as the “Christian end of days ideology” to Gareth Train and later to Ms Train. The couple also watched videos from a YouTube account that Mr. Day in 2014, she said.

The indictment stated that between January 2022 and February 2023, Mr. Day’s online activities on YouTube demonstrated “a desire to incite violence and threaten a variety of groups and individuals, including law enforcement and government agencies.”

Under the name Geronimo’s Bones, he wrote in a response to a video the Trains posted on YouTube after the shooting: “Please do what you have to do, with determination in your hand and anger in your stomach. Again, tell me I can help you. Whatever is within my power to do for you, I will not hesitate.

The US attorney’s office in Arizona said Mr Day posted a video on YouTube after the Queensland shooting in which he threatened any law enforcement officer who came to his home. He also threatened to kill the director-general of the World Health Organization in February 2023 on the video platform BitChute, calling on others to join him.

Each of the charges Mr. Day faces carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and up to three years of supervised release.

Nitiana Mann, Legal Attaché at the US Embassy in Canberra, said at the press conference in Brisbane that the suspect had appeared in court in Arizona for the first time. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney.

Ms Scanlon said Australian investigators in the United States continued to work on the investigation.

“This is a terribly tragic event involving the loss of life,” she said. “We need to understand the ‘why’.”