{"id":11351,"date":"2018-05-11T06:29:16","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T10:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=11351"},"modified":"2018-05-11T06:29:16","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T10:29:16","slug":"margaret-river-deaths-seven-people-found-dead-in-western-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2018\/05\/11\/margaret-river-deaths-seven-people-found-dead-in-western-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret River deaths: Seven people found dead in Western Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seven people have been found dead at a rural property near Margaret River in Western Australia (WA), police say.<\/p>\n

The bodies of four children and three adults were discovered in the town of Osmington, 280km (170 miles) south of Perth, on Friday.<\/p>\n

Authorities would not say how the victims died, but confirmed that two firearms were found at the scene.<\/p>\n

There was no ongoing threat to public safety, police said. They would not confirm reports of a murder-suicide.<\/p>\n

“The bodies of two adults were located outside [and] five bodies were located inside a building on the rural property,” said WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson.<\/p>\n

“It appears that gunshot wounds are there, but I don’t want to go further than that.”<\/p>\n

If confirmed to be a mass shooting, it would be Australia’s worst since a massacre in Tasmania claimed the lives of 35 people in 1996.<\/p>\n

Authorities said names and ages of the victims would not be disclosed until next of kin had been notified.<\/p>\n

However, Mr Dawson said they were believed to have lived at the property.<\/p>\n

“The loss of any life is tragic, but four children and three adults – this is a significant tragedy,” he said.<\/p>\n

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Authorities were called to the scene at 05:15 local time (21:15 GMT on Thursday) after receiving a call from a “male person”, Mr Dawson said.<\/p>\n

The commissioner did not give details of the call, but said it had been recorded.<\/p>\n

He said specialist police officers from Perth would oversee a large-scale investigation.<\/p>\n

Osmington is a tiny rural community about 20km from Margaret River, a popular tourist and wine-growing area.<\/p>\n

One neighbour, Felicity Haynes, described the residents of the property as “lovely people”.<\/p>\n

“They were a very socially-aware family – doing their best to create a safe community – and that is why it is so shocking to think that could be destroyed so quickly,”\u00a0she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Local shire president\u00a0Pamela Townshend told Fairfax Media<\/a>: “It’s sending shockwaves through the whole community – we’re all linked in one way or another, every family.”<\/p>\n

After the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia enacted strict gun laws that banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons.<\/p>\n

It has had one other mass shooting since Port Arthur – the murder-suicide of a family of five in New South Wales in 2014.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven people have been found dead at a rural property near Margaret River in Western Australia (WA), police say. The bodies of four children and three adults were discovered in the town of Osmington, 280km […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[350,109,2,6],"tags":[819,5116],"class_list":{"0":"post-11351","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"category-headline","9":"category-news","10":"category-world","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-osmington","13":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11353,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11351\/revisions\/11353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}