THE East Keilor siege has finally ended after 44 hours.
Christopher Dean Binse, who barricaded himself inside the home in Sterling Drive, East Keilor on Monday morning, emerged from the house just after 2am and was taken into custody.
Moments before making the arrest, police could be heard yelling over a megaphone: “Chris, come out the front door. Put the gun down, don’t be silly”. They instructed him to walk towards the driveway with his hands over his head.
A 3AW reporter who was on the scene said Binse, who calls himself ’’Badness’’, emerged with a firearm at 2.11am and a burst of three gunshots was heard, although it was not known who fired them.
Click on the image below for our gallery of the siege.
The same police officer could be heard on the megaphone yelling: ‘‘Put the gun down! Put the gun down Chris! Chris, put the gun down!’’
Binse was then taken into police custody and was assessed by paramedics before being taken to St Kilda Road police complex, where he is being questioned by armed crime detectives this morning.
He is not believed to be injured.
Sterling Drive and some surrounding streets remain cordoned off this morning as forensic police examine the house, which has been declared a crime scene.
‘‘We’ve got a fair bit of work to do. We hopefully will get them back in in the morning [or] during the day,’’ he said.
‘‘This is just another phase of this operation concluded.’’
The dramatic climax came hours after a woman, believed to be Binse’s girlfriend and whose house was at the centre of the siege, emerged from the house about 7.30pm.
3AW reported she had been lured out with a series of “flashbang” grenades that police were believed to have thrown through the window of the house. The grenades disorient suspects with deafening booms and bright lights.
The woman is believed to have run out of the house in panic, while Binse remained holed up.
Police took the woman into custody and kept her at the scene. She is believed to have provided valuable information to the police about Binse’s movements and his state of mind.
Reports say she was not being held as a hostage but was in the house willingly.
Immediately after the arrest, Acting Superintendent Stephen Mutton said the woman was treated by paramedics and provided information “which allowed us to resolve this.”
He would not go into detail about exactly how police had drawn out Binse, saying only he had been handed over to armed crime taskforce detectives for questioning.
“Our aim was to safely resolve it and we’ve done that,” he told reporters at the scene, describing the outcome as a success.
“It’s taken a long time (and) inconvenienced a lot of people.”
He said it was unclear whether the three gunshots heard at the time were fired by police or by Binse.
‘‘We’ve still got to get that confirmed,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s a situation where we have a number of [police] members involved and obviously we have to go through a debriefing process. We will do that in the next couple of hours.
‘‘I can’t go into the tactical options we utilised but we will provide further detail after we debrief our members.’’
More than a dozen families were forced from their homes and the nearby major road, Keilor Park Drive, was closed.
In all, about 15 shots were fired during the incident, which is believed to have been sparked by a confrontation with police at a local La Porchetta restaurant on Sunday.
A squadron of officers moved in on Tuesday evening, and a police spokeswoman said: ‘‘Tactical options have been implemented in an effort to force the occupants to surrender in a safe manner.’’
