A 33-year-old man with a history of violence who was granted weekend bail to get married is now on the run after fleeing while his wife was in the shower.
The man has links to motorcycle gangs and police fear he may have access to firearms for this reason, the chief commissioner of Victoria police, Graham Ashton, said.
A county court judge granted him bail despite the opposition of police prosecutors. The bail was granted because the man feared losing a $6,000 deposit on the venue if forced to change the wedding date.
“Certainly the case is that we’ll have to do some planning about how we grab this guy,” Ashton told radio 3AW on Monday morning. “It’s just going to depend on where he turns up and what the circumstances are.”
Initially, police were unable to name the man for fear it would prejudice his upcoming court case. But on Monday morning Victoria police announced the fugitive taskforce had taken over the investigation and released the man’s name as Murat Shomshe.
Ashton said people could see a list of people who had skipped bail, along with their photographs, on the Victoria police website, and said if members of the public believed they had come across him they should call police.
“We certainly wouldn’t advise the public to be going up and confronting this guy.”
Detective senior sergeant David Snare, from the Fugitive Taskforce, made an appeal on Monday afternoon for Shomshe to surrender himself to police, or for any family members aware of his whereabouts to report him.
Shomshe was last seen by by police at his home just before 6am on 27 July, hours before the court appearance. Police were checking he was complying with his bail, Snare said.
There had been no further sightings by police or the public, Snare said. He would not name the suburb where Shomshe had last been seen, but said police believed he may be in the northern suburbs of Coburg and Epping or the south-west suburbs of Altona and Werribee.
The wedding took place on the weekend of 25 July, the Herald Sun reported. Shomshe was ordered to return to court two days after the wedding.
The Herald Sun also reported that the county court judge Richard Maidment had expressed some reservations before eventually granting the man bail.
“I think I’d be inclined on conditions to grant him bail over the weekend but expect him to surrender into custody again on the Monday morning.”
The secretary of the Police Association of Victoria, Ron Iddles, told 3AW the court should have more rigorously taken into account the risk of the man fleeing.
“I don’t think it would meet the show cause or exceptional circumstances in the bail application, so it’s very concerning,” he said.
