Wieambilla police ambush (Queensland)

On 12 December 2022, four Queensland police constables arrived at a remote rural property at Wieambilla, in Queensland's Western Downs, to conduct a routine welfare check. The three residents, brothers Nathaniel and Gareth Train and Gareth's wife Stacey Train, opened fire on the officers without warning. Constable Matthew Arnold, 26, and Constable Rachel McCrow, 29, were shot and killed. Two other constables escaped, one after hiding in nearby bushland while the property was set alight.

Alan Dare, a 58-year-old neighbour who came to investigate the smoke and gunfire, was also shot dead. After an hours-long siege, specialist police stormed the property that night and shot all three Train family members dead. The ambush had been planned in advance and directed specifically at law enforcement.

In February 2023, the Queensland Police Service released an intelligence assessment concluding the attack was a religiously motivated terrorist attack. Investigators said the Trains were motivated by a Christian extremist ideology and subscribed to premillennialism, a fundamentalist end-times belief system, based on diaries, notes, phone messages, social media posts and body-worn camera footage recovered at the scene. In December 2023, US citizen Donald Day Jr was arrested in Arizona over online communications with the Trains, with prosecutors alleging he exchanged end-of-days ideological messages with them.

This was domestic religiously motivated extremist violence, not state-directed hybrid warfare or sabotage. Queensland Police designated it the country's first religiously motivated terrorist attack driven by a Christian premillennialist and conspiracist worldview. That official terrorism characterisation was later contested: on 21 November 2025, State Coroner Terry Ryan found the killings did not meet the statutory definition of a terrorist act under the Commonwealth Criminal Code, attributing them instead to the Trains' shared delusional disorder rooted in their persecutory religious beliefs. The competing findings of police and the coroner are both presented here; this entry may change as further public material emerges.