Bear threat for pair

Murder suspects face risk of attack as they try to evade police

THE threat of a polar bear attack has become a reality for the huge Canadian police and military contingent searching for the teenage duo suspected of shooting dead Australian tourist Lucas Fowler, his US girlfriend and a university botanist.

The manhunt for Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, continued on Saturday with the addition of a Royal Canadian Air Force CC-130H Hercules and personnel searching the unforgiving wilderness near Gillam, a remote area in northern Manitoba.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police distributed a photo on Saturday of a polar bear encountered by searchers 200km north of Gillam.

McLeod and Schmegelsky have been on the run since the bodies of Mr Fowler, 23, from Sydney, and his North Carolina girlfriend Chynna Deese, 24, were found dead on the side of a highway 3000km away in Canada’s west on July 14. Locals around Gillam predicted the teenagers would face extreme challenges – polar and black bears, wolves, irritating black flies and mosquitoes, dense scrub and swamps – if they did, as suspected by the RCMP, enter bushland on Monday night after setting fire to their stolen getaway Toyota RAV-4. “A polar bear was spotted during the search for suspects earlier today – about 200km north of Gillam,” the RCMP, with a photo of the bear, wrote in a tweet on Saturday.

“Just some of the wildlife that can be found in northern Manitoba.” The nearby town of Churchill is on a polar bear migration route.

The Canadian government, desperate to catch the fugitives, immediately approved the RCMP request for military support.

On the ground authorities went door-to-door canvassing locals in their homes and searching abandoned buildings in the hope of finding the duo or picking up clues.