Police say the manhunt in the central North Island is an "unfolding situation". Central District Commander Superintendent Sue Schwalger said this morning that "the first challenge is we don't know where these offenders are." Schwalger urged Dolphy Kahu to hand himself in.
For a community swamped with armed, masked police, canine units and patrol cars, Ohakune's Miro St seemed remarkably relaxed tonight.
Neighbours in the area where one woman was arrested and another two people were led away for questioning shot video of the police raids or stood across the road watching the action, interested and at times jovial.
The house, believed to be where Dolphy Kohu and his partner lived, was visited and raided several times.
One said the wanted man was "bad news" but his relatives had never caused problems for locals.
One neighbour, who asked only to be called Ranginui, said his interaction with residents of the house consisted of "big waves" and no dramas.
Despite the novelty and excitement of the huge police presence in his neighbourhood, Ranginui hoped for a fast and peaceful resolution to the ongoing hunt for Kohu and associates.
The white, 1970s-style weatherboard house was visible to onlookers who watched each police search, including the last, when police spoke to two women, one of whom carried a baby and was visibly upset.
AOS and police talk to a female occupant of the Miro St house (woman obscured by house). Photo / Supplied
Tauranga siblings Reuben Steens, 18, Lissy Steens, 20, and Hannah Ingram, 25, were in Ohakune with their parents to go skiing.
They had no idea what was going on in the town until media and armed police turned up outside their rented chalet on Miro St.
They didn't want to get in the way of developments so stayed inside most of the day.
At Whangaehu Valley Rd on Ohakune's outskirts, where Kohu and his associates crashed and dumped the stolen patrol car, armed police kept watching over the vehicle.
Some residents there were oblivious to the drama, but one had an early wake-up call when Kohu and his associates went to the house after being left stranded.
It was there, on Whangaehu Valley Rd, police say, that the fugitives called for an associate to pick them up.
At Raetihi, 11km from Ohakune, locals were relaxed despite warnings from police earlier in the day to stay inside and keep doors locked.
In a neighbourhood of small paddocks filled with pigs, goats, and sheep, there was little to indicate the mayhem from barely 10 hours earlier when Kohu or one of his associates allegedly fired on police officers after crashing a red station wagon into a barbed wire fence.
Dolphy Kohu. Photo / Facebook
By early afternoon, a few scraps of metal and a strip of red plastic lay among the wrecked fence but police were long gone.
The hunt for Kohu had fanned out across the thinly populated area.
Near the ruined fence, Annabel Dekker, a Middlemore Hospital doctor visiting from Auckland, was relaxed about the incident.
She said her family had no safety concerns because they believed police were doing everything possible to catch the offenders.
Overnight, Dr Dekker woke up when she heard a knock at the door at about 3.40am.The officers under fire had run around the corner and up Islington Rd to the Dekkers house.
The policemen "made their way to the one house that had lights on", Dr Dekker said."It definitely sounded like quite a frantic knocking.
But I just thought it was someone who'd found themselves locked outside the house."She found two police officers - "one younger, one older" - at the door.
"I thought they'd come to bear some bad news...inform me of the death of someone on the roads or something like that. But no, they were obviously shaken about what they'd experienced for themselves."
She said the policemen asked to use the landline, spoke to colleagues for about 20 minutes, then went to retrieve the police car.
Armed officers carrying out the arrest on a Miro St property. Photo / Supplied
"They did mention that they thought the assailants may have taken one of the cars."
She said it would have been a scary experience for the policemen, with no street lights to illuminate the drizzly, cold night.
Another neighbour on a small lifestyle block nearby said there were only about three routes out of the district. There were also very few useful hiding places for somebody like Kohu nearby, he said.
He was unperturbed, and bemused at the media and police influx.
