Police Besiege House While Shots Fired

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32234, 28 February 1970, Page 1

Police Besiege House While Shots Fired

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, February 27.

Armed police late tonight were preparing for a siege against a house in Laingholm where an armed man was refusing police requests to come out.

By 8.30 p.m. three rifle shots had been fired from the house but nobody had been hit. In the house with the man, aged about 25, are his wife and three children, aged three, two, and a small baby.

The police said that soon after 7 p.m. two constables approached the man as he was working on a car in his driveway to talk to him about $l4O said to be owing in traffic fines. The man was asked to come with the police to talk about the matter. He went inside the house and when asked by a constable to come out he refused.

Constable A. Farmer said he then noticed a man with a rifle in a window in the house. He told the second policeman, Constable F. E. Laraman, who was still standing by the house, to come away. Constable Farmer, who was in a police car, said he saw the man levelling the rifle at Constable Laraman and called out “Keep walking.”

The second constable walked away from the house and Constable Laraman drove

away. The Auckland armed! offenders squad was told and j Kauri Point Road was sealed. 1 After members of the squad arrived near the house a • group of police, led by Detective Inspector E. G. Perry, made their way up the road i to near the house where the i man was still inside. Later, other parties of ; armed police took up posi- 1 tions in thick native bush in 1 front of, beside, and behind i the house. ; About 9 p.m. the police said that the house would remain 1 surrounded until daylight. Many residents of Kauri

I Point Road arrived home I after late shopping and found access to their homes blocked. They gathered in subdued, worried groups at the police road block. About 10.5 p.m. three rifle shots rang out—about 30 seconds between each shot At 10.25 pun. it was reported that all the lights in the house had gone out. At that stage the police radioed central station and asked that a St John ambulance, which had been waiting at Titirangi, be sent to the road block at the end of Kauri Point Road.