Hostage-taker in Australia had been acquitted of terror plot, says police

A gunman who killed a man and took a woman hostage before dying in a police shoot-out had been acquitted of plotting a terror attack at a Sydney army base years earlier, Australian police said.

Yesterday's siege at an apartment building in a Melbourne suburb was being treated as an act of terror, but Victoria state police chief commissioner Graham Ashton said the gunman appeared to have acted alone and not as part of any ongoing plot or threat.