Charlotte Gallagher

In 2021 police arrested Desi Freeman, previously known as Desmond Philby, during an anti-government protest. He was a self-declared sovereign citizen who regarded the government as illegitimate.

In August last year he opened fire on a team of police officers when they arrived at his semi-rural property in Porpanka, about 300 kilometers northeast of Melbourne. They'd gone there with a search warrant in relation to a child sexual abuse investigation.

Two officers were shot dead at the scene and a third was injured. Freeman, who was believed to have expert bushcraft skills and multiple firearms, then fled into bushland in Mount Buffalo National Park. Although he's not yet been formally identified, police say Freeman was shot after a three-hour standoff. Mike Bush is the chief commissioner of Victoria Police. This morning Victoria Police fatally shot a man.

as a result of the operation. Everything I know at this point tells me that this shooting was justified. The operation was conducted by professionals. There was an appeal to encourage the person to come out. He then exited the building. There was

Se on mahdollista, että hän jätäisi rauhallisesti, jota hän ei jätänyt. Tämä saa loppuun mitä oli tärkeä ja pahasta tapahtumaa. Tarkastus Desi Freemanin oli yksi laajemmista australialaista historiaa. 1 miljoonan australialaisista dollarista oli otettu tietoon, joka liittyi hänen kappaleeseen. Yhdessä noin 450 poliisipolitiikkaa oli kiinnostunut, kuten New Zealandin ja australialainen armiin.

More than a hundred homes were searched, and police used helicopters and sniffer dogs to scour a vast area of scrubland that was also littered with disused mineshafts. But they admitted that Freeman had known the terrain much better than they did.

Richard Hamilton. Thieves in Italy have made off with paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse worth millions of dollars after breaking into a museum near the city of Parma in just a matter of minutes. It's one of the most significant thefts in Italy in recent years and follows the audacious robbery of France's crown jewels from the Louvre in Paris last October. So what actually happens to stolen art?

Leila Nathu spoke to Noah Charney, the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. In this case it's quite clear that the thieves knew what they were after. There were the three pictures that they took plus a fourth one, the identity of which has not come forth to the public yet, that they tried to take but got scared off by the security system, the alarms going off. So it was targeted, but it was probably chosen as a location to burgle because it was relatively underprotected

A bit out of the way. And they saw the objects as high value, easily portable objects that were perhaps under secured. Are they high value though on a black market for art? That's an excellent question and the short answer is no. If art thieves knew how difficult it was to turn stolen art, especially by famous artists, into cash, they probably wouldn't bother. So at open auction these are extremely valuable, particularly a Cezanne watercolor, which is very rare.

But there is almost no market, black or otherwise, for identifiable, unique stolen paintings. So thieves have to come up with another way to profit from them. But a lot of them don't know how to, because their understanding of how art crime works is from the same films and fiction that the general public watches, which suggests that criminal collectors exist, when in fact in known history we know of almost none that have ever existed.

So they're not stealing to order for sort of underworld collectors. So what then happens? They just end up staying in storage, presumably, never to resurface. So it's true. The idea of criminal art collectors is primarily from the realm of fiction. I know of a few dozen counterexamples, but that's it. And there are tens of thousands of art thefts reported worldwide every year. So it's just a fraction. But what happens more often is maybe more interesting, but more complex. Most art thefts involves organized crime at some level.

Organised crime groups will sometimes take these stolen objects and use them on a closed black market in dealing with other criminal groups and using them for trade or collateral for other deals involving objects that have a high risk in turning into cash, like arms and drugs. And you have this idea that the stolen work of art, which experts estimate on a black market is worth maybe 10% of its legitimate value.

Noa Chani.

Finally, an incredibly rare Bronze Age shield has been returned to Scotland for the first time in more than 230 years. The shield was originally discovered in a peat bog in North Ayrshire in about 1779 and has been in a museum in London ever since. Matthew Knight is the senior creator of Prehistory at National Museums Scotland.

It's a really, really important object. These were highly decorated objects, generally considered to be symbols of ceremony or status, but we've also been able to show that they're very effective defense weapons.

Describe the shield for us. How big is it? What does it look like? The shield is about 60 centimeters in diameter. It's a round shield hammered from a fingerlingot of bronze into a very, very thin sheet. But then it's been decorated with concentric rings and concentric hammered bosses. And there's over 9,000 of these bosses hammered into the surface of the shield.

Kuulostaa siltä, että se on käytetty rauhassa tai itsevaiheessa. Kyllä, tämä on todella mielenkiintoinen asia, kun näet todella selkeästi, missä prehistoriallinen rauha tai rauha on saanut tämän rauhan. Ne olivat todennäköisesti käytettyä rauhassa, ja tämä on myös todella tärkeää, koska nämä ovat joitain ensimmäisiä alkuperäisiä rauhassa ja vahvistuksessa Britannissa.

When are we talking about? What year? Do you have a sense of when the shield was created and what the conflicts were that were driving its use? The shield dates to just over 3,000 years ago in what we call the Bronze Age.

This is a period where people are settled in farming communities, they're living off the land, but this is also a period where we see the invention of the sword, the first object in human history that's designed purely for harming another human, unfortunately. And with this, if somebody has a sword, you want a shield or you want a bigger sword, and it fuels what I call the Bronze Age arms race, where you have societies coming into

That was Matthew Knight speaking to Justin Webb. And the shield will be on display towards the end of June at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.