In the hours after the Wieambilla shooting, the digital footprint of one of the shooters surfaced, giving early insight into the motivations behind the terrorist attack.
Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train were killed by police on December 12, 2022 after murdering two police and a neighbour in what has been classified as a Christian religiously motivated terrorist attack by Queensland Police.
Gareth Train left a trail of paranoid, conspiracy theory-filled screeds on obscure and extreme Australian blogs that revealed his doomsday Christian fundamentalist, anti-government and anti-police beliefs.
Some of these comments even foreshadowed future violence: “Don’t fear death. Death comes to all of us. Don’t die old on your back wishing you had taken action. What is toxic is failure to act according to ones conscience,” Train wrote in February 2021.
On at least two of these websites, editors directly interacted with him. One website even published a full post authored by Gareth Train, accusing leaders of the anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown freedom movement of working for the government (which, he said, is run by another nefarious Jesuit cabal).
In response to the reporting on Train’s comments, some of these websites — which Crikey has chosen not to name to avoid unnecessarily promoting them — addressed Train’s online contributions by questioning the narratives of what happened in Wieambilla, casting the attack as a new conspiracy. Others have completely ignored these comments altogether.
Curiously, Train’s comments have disappeared from at least three of these websites. On one website, more than 40 of his comments were removed. Train’s article, too, has been removed.
None of the websites responded to questions about why the comments and article had been removed.
The Trains’ YouTube videos, first reported on by Crikey, were taken off YouTube in response to a police request. Queensland Police has been approached for comment.
The Trains’ online history will come under the formal scope of the coronial inquest into the attacks, as it considers the shooters’ “profiles and motivations”.
A fourth and final pre-inquest hearing is set for June 24 with the inquest set to start at the end of July.
