Friday's news in 5 minutes.

1. Gold Coast cop accused of snooping through the personal details of netball star.

A Gold Coast police officer is facing computer hacker charges after he allegedly snooped the personal details of netball star Laura Geitz, the Courier Mail reports.

Officer Stephen Patrick Wright is accused of accessing the Queensland Police Service database to read the personal files of 29-year-old Laura Geitz and more than a dozen others.

The 40-year-old is believed to have accessed the service without consent on 80 separate occasions between April and October last year.

Geitz is currently taking a break from sport as she expects her first child. She has captained the Queensland Firebirds and the Australian Diamonds and is regarded as of one Australian netball’s most successful players.

According to the Courier Mail, Geitz is aware of the allegations against Wright but does not wish to comment.

Wright was stood down from official duties in December while the case is ongoing. His lawyer is understood to be disputing several details.

2. Family has one-week-old baby removed by social services after father ‘praised formula milk’.

A local council in West England has been ordered to pay damages after social services took a week-old baby into their care after the father expressed ‘unorthodox’ views about breastfeeding, UK’s The Telegraph reports.

A family court ordered the council to pay the couple and their now 15-month-old son AU$18,251 and ruled that the council had breached the pair’s human rights.

The couple are aged in their 20s and are believed to both suffer from mild learning difficulties.

Four days after their son was born, hospital staff called the council to express their concerns about their ability to raise a child.

“It was suggested that the mother had no family support, and that the father was expressing unorthodox views about the need for sterilisation of bottles, and the benefits of formula milk,” Mr Justice Cobb said in his ruling.

The council held an emergency hearing to place the boy into the care of his paternal grandmother, but the parents were never told the hearing was taking place.

3. Three people have been found dead inside a water tank on a rural NSW property.

The bodies of three people have been found inside a water tank in what authorities suspect to be a gas poisoning incident, 9 News reports.

Police were called to the rural NSW property in Gunning around 6:20pm yesterday after a man collapsed while working in an empty in-ground water tank.

Police understand a second man and a woman attempted to help the man, but also collapsed. All three were found dead by a neighbour.

All three victims were in their 60s. The deaths are not being treated as suspicious but investigators are looking at whether gas poisoning may have contributed to their deaths.

4. Man attacked with axe, poles, nail-studded bats at Bondi Beach with his girlfriend.

Police are searching for three men after a 34-year-old man was attacked with an axe, metal poles and nail-studded bats in front of the public at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.

9 News reports that Michael Nicholas was sitting on the grass with his girlfriend when he was set upon by the three men and assaulted.

Nicholas suffered head injuries as a result of the attack and was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital in a stable condition.

Several thousand dollars in cash was discovered by paramedics in Nicholas’ pockets.

Horrified onlookers described the attack to 9 News.

“You can imagine the sound when those nails were puncturing his skin,” one witness said.

“He looked up and all you could see was red. His face was drenched in blood. They just kept hitting him in the face while he was on the ground.”

The three attackers – described as well built and in their 20s or 30s, possibly middle-eastern – are believed to have fled the scene in a white Mercedes.

5. Police are searching for a man in connection to the murder of two teenage girls.

Indiana State Police have released an image of a man they want to speak to in connection to the murder of 14-year-old Libby German and 13-year-old Abby Williams, WDRB reports.

The bodies of the two girls were found on Monday along Deer Creek near Delphi. The girls had been dropped off on the trail by a family member to go hiking but failed to return at the agreed meeting time.

Authorities have released an image of a man who was seen hiking on the trails around the time the girls were there. They have asked the public to help identify him so he can be questioned about anything he may have seen.

Police have not yet released information on the girls’ cause or manner of deaths, but have confirmed the deaths are being treated as a double homicide.

Indiana State Police Sgt. Kim Riley and Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby confirmed that there was a killer, or killers, on the loose and no suspects were named or in custody.

“Yes, there is somebody out there who did this, and we’re going to track them down,” Riley said in a press conference.

“Right now, we are following up on hundreds of hundreds of leads that have come in,” he said.

6. Body of missing man found in water off Maroubra beach.

The body of a man who was missing off Maroubra beach in Sydney has been located by lifeguards around midday on Thursday, 7 News reports.

The man is yet to be formally identified, but it is believed to be 26-year-old Sudeep Uprety, who has been missing for two days.

“About midday [Thursday] the body of a man was found by lifeguards under a rock ledge at Mahon Pools,” police told 7 News.

The body of Uprety’s female companion, 23-year-old Shristi Bhandari, was found washed up on the beach by a jogger early on Tuesday morning.

Shristi Bhandari had arrived in Australia just two weeks earlier from Nepal to study a Masters of Accounting at the University of New South Wales.

It’s believe the pair had gone out to dinner with friends before heading to the popular beach for a swim.

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