Lawyer blames psychiatric disorder shared by 3 Australian Christian extremists for fatal siege

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Three Christian extremists would probably not have fatally shot two police officers and a bystander in an ambush on a rural Australian property and wounded a third officer two years ago if they had not shared the same psychiatric disorder, a coroner was told on Thursday.

Brothers Gareth and Nathaniel Train and Gareth’s wife, Stacey Train, were killed by police reinforcements with armored vehicles, ending a six-hour siege on Dec. 12, 2022, in the sparsely populated Wieambilla region west of the Queensland state capital, Brisbane.

State Coroner Terry Ryan on Thursday ended his 17-day inquiry into the cause of the violence that claimed six lives.

He will release the findings of his investigation and make recommendations aimed at preventing a repeat of the tragedy at a later date.

The lawyer leading evidence in the inquiry, Ruth O’Gorman, told Ryan in her final submissions that the Trains believed the “End Times were imminent.”

The court has heard that the Trains followed the Christian fundamentalist belief system known as pre-millennialism that focused on an apocalypse before Jesus Christ’s return to Earth.

“Their religious extremism was a key driver for their actions and the Trains were likely suffering from a shared delusional disorder which pre-existed those religious convictions,” O’Gorman said.

Their shared delusion involved a belief that they were being persecuted by authorities, particularly police, she said.

“The Trains likely developed their religious extremist views and beliefs in a way to make sense of, and even seek hope in, a world in which they truly and wrongly believed they were being persecuted and it is unlikely that their religious extremism would have developed without the