Rifleman Seized After Killing 32 in Australia

A gunman who slaughtered at least 32 people at a busy tourist site was captured today after he bolted in flames from an inn he set ablaze with three hostages inside.

The gunman, whom police identified as a 29-year-old Australian with a history of psychological problems, had opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle Sunday afternoon on tourists at a colonial prison site on the island of Tasmania.

It was the worst shooting massacre in Australia this century.

“Various massacres would pale into insignificance when you look at what has happened in Tasmania,” Tasmanian Police Commissioner John Johnson said.

Police indicated that they expected to find the bodies of the three hostages inside the guest cottage, where the gunman took them and held police at bay for 12 hours.

The gunman is to be charged in court after he is treated for burns, but doctors have not said when that will be. He will not be identified until the charges are made, and under Australia’s strict trial laws, the media may not report about his background until the trial has begun.

Witnesses said the incident began when the blond man drove up to the prison in a Volkswagen with a surfboard strapped on top and talked casually with some of the 500 people outside.

“He said, ‘There’s a lot of WASPs [white Anglo-Saxon Protestants] around today, there’s not many Japs here, are there?’ and then started muttering to himself,” a survivor, who was not identified, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The man then walked into a cafe, pulled the rifle from a tennis bag and methodically started shooting.

“He wasn’t going bang-bang-bang-bang--it was ‘bang’ and then he’d pick someone else out and line them up and shoot them,” witness Phillip Milburn told the radio.

The gunman moved on to a nearby pub, shooting and killing more people. He seized a man at a gas station, stole a car and put the man in the trunk. He drove three miles to a bed-and-breakfast cottage, owned by a couple who apparently were friends of his late father, and took them hostage. The Age newspaper of Melbourne identified them as David and Sally Martin.

By early Monday, more than 200 local and special police units had surrounded the guest house, where he allegedly held the couple and one guest of the inn.

Police tried to negotiate by phone with the gunman, who fired two heavy caliber military-type rifles at them and at helicopters airlifting out the dead and wounded. He demanded a helicopter for himself.

When he set the cottage on fire, flames finally drove him from the building. He threw his rifle aside.

“His clothing was on fire, and he started taking his clothing off,” Police Supt. Bob Fielding said.

Exploding ammunition in the burning house prevented officers from searching it to learn the fate of the three hostages. “It doesn’t look very good,” Fielding said.

Police said 25 of those killed were Australians. Two Malaysians and an Indian also died.

Another victim was New Zealander Jason Winter, a 29-year-old winemaker who died instantly after he threw himself in front of family members at the cafe to shield them, relatives said.

Not all bodies had been accounted for. Many victims were not carrying identification.

Among the dead was an infant as well as two sisters, ages 3 and 6, and their mother.

One American and two Canadians were wounded along with at least 16 others. Police said only that the unidentified American, a man from Washington state, was not badly hurt.

One Melbourne woman said she survived by hiding under a table at the cafe.

“There were people just sitting there in their chairs where they’d been eating--dead,” she said. “There was a weird sort of calm, as if no one could believe what they were seeing.”

The gunman left “shooting as he went, shooting everybody he could see,” said Wendy Scurr, who works at the front desk at the historic site.

The man kept shooting outside the cafe, firing at screaming tourists trying to flee.

The gunman next shot at two buses, killing several tourists in each and one driver. He fired on cars approaching the gates to the site.

“The guy that we were with had to go and help take a stretcher in,” witness Karen Jones told Australian radio, “and the mother was saying, ‘You have to get my baby to the hospital, quick, quick.’ But it was already dead.”

The old Port Arthur prison colony is on the Tasman Peninsula, connected to Tasmania’s mainland by one road along a narrow isthmus. Police closed off the road into Port Arthur, the landing site of some of the toughest convicts England sent into Australian exile in the 1800s.

The prison complex is Tasmania’s most popular tourist attraction after the island’s parks and wilderness areas. Its neat green lawns surround the ivy-covered remains of a Gothic church and the crumbling sandstone ruins of the old penitentiary, where 30,000 repeat offenders, political prisoners and highly dangerous convicts were sent from 1830 to 1877.

State gun laws vary in Australia, but it is fairly easy for a person without a criminal record to buy a rifle or shotgun.

Tasmania has one of the laxest gun laws in the nation. Until recent law changes, almost anyone could buy any kind of weapon--even a machine gun.