Australian police yesterday shot and detained itinerant fruit-picker Mr Robert Long, wanted for questioning over a hostel fire which killed 15 backpackers, most of them foreign tourists.
Police said Mr Long attacked officers with a knife when they found him in bush near the farming village of Howard, not far from the scene of the fatal fire at Childers, in Queensland.
"He confronted police armed with a knife and attacked police. Police fired and he was wounded in the arm," a police spokesman said. A police officer was stabbed in the chin in the struggle.
Mr Long (37), was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and placed under police guard. Police said they did not know when they would interview Mr Long, who was seen near a rubbish bin fire in the lounge of the hostel on the night of the blaze.
The backpackers died when fire tore through the Palace Backpackers Hostel last Friday in Childers, 300 km north of Brisbane. The fire killed six Britons, one Irish national, four Australians, two Dutch, one Korean and one Japanese.
Two officers and a police dog had been tracking Mr Long for several hours after they uncovered a makeshift campsite and food scraps near Howard.
"The police officer in the front was set upon by Long with a knife. The police officer that was following fired upon Long," the police spokesman said.
Howard resident, Mr Darryl Miller, said police caught Mr Long on the outskirts of the town.
"It's not very densely populated. It's just riverbanks, bush and a couple of houses in the vicinity," Mr Miller told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
Police said a sighting of Mr Long had been reported on Tuesday at about the same time as the last two bodies were being removed from the charred remains of the hostel.
Police have said they were investigating a suicide note believed to be from Mr Long, which was left at the Federal Hotel in Childers a few days before the fire.
Post mortems are yet to begin on the bodies as police search for the cause of the inferno. Most of the dead were found huddled in a back room on the top floor of the wooden, two-storey hostel.
Seventy people survived the blaze, some by kicking open locked doors, squeezing through barred windows and running across the roofs of adjoining shops.
An inquest has been launched into the fire.