Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Australian police investigating a highly-publicized and controversial suicide have swooped in on offices of the country's leading euthanasia advocate, three months after a woman killed herself surrounded by pro-euthanasia activists.

In simultaneous raids on two of Dr. Philip Nitschke's premises, which are 1,600 miles apart, Queensland state police removed patient files and computer drives, using bolt cutters to break open locked storage containers.

Nitschke said from the northern city of Darwin Wednesday that the police produced a warrant referring to information relating to the death last May of Nancy Crick, a 69-year-old Queensland pensioner.

But most of the information they removed had nothing to do with Crick, he said. Some related to his plans to launch on August 20 a campaign to distribute plastic bag suicide kits, which may now have to be postponed.

"That may have been part of their motive," he said.

Also raided were the homes of another euthanasia activist who acted as a spokesman for Crick, and a man whose company hosted a website used to publicize her right-to-die campaign.

Nitschke expressed surprise that the police could find the resources to mount a multi-state operation at a time when money was said to be tight.

Similar complaints were made Wednesday by several public figures, including the mayor of Queensland's capital city, who called the raids a waste of public resources and a "witch hunt."

State police commissioner Bob Atkinson said the police had a responsibility to thoroughly investigate all deaths where circumstances were suspicious or unusual.

Crick took a lethal drug at her home on May 22, surrounded by 21 pro-euthanasia activists. Nitschke was her doctor and advisor, but was absent when she died.

Her death followed a months-long campaign, which included an online diary in which she described her suffering as a result of terminal bowel cancer.

But a post-mortem found no signs of cancer, only indications of earlier surgery, which evidently had removed all traces of it.

Nitschke later admitted it was a mistake not to have made public his knowledge that his patient did not have cancer at the time of her death.

Dr. David van Gend of the anti-euthanasia doctors' and lawyers' group, Trust, said the "spectator suicide" of Crick violated the essential role of the law in preventing any outside party from involvement in a suicide.

The law had this role, he said, "not because it wants to make suicide lonely, but because it wants to rule out as best it can the malicious involvement of any other person."

Van Gend said although his organization had not pushed police to investigate, it felt Nitschke had a case to answer.

Moreover, he said the presence of pro-euthanasia activists gathered around Crick when she ended her life may have constituted a form of group pressure, essentially leaving her with no room to back out.

"This is distantly akin to cult pressure, in that there is a group expectation of this member, around whom they have gathered to celebrate her suicide. If they were dressed in strange robes we'd just lock them all up. Because they were not, we don't do that."

Van Gend said this must never be allowed to happen again in Australia, otherwise it may give rise to a situation where malicious pressure may be brought to bear on people who were even more vulnerable than Crick.

Australian pro-life campaigner Margaret Tighe said Tuesday she would like to see Nitschke "locked up in jail."

She compared him to U.S. euthanasia advocate Jack "Dr. Death" Kevorkian, who was sentenced in 1999 to 10-25 years' imprisonment for his role in the death of a man with Lou Gehrig's disease.

Like Kevorkian, she said, Nitschke "continues to thumb his nose at the law ... but one day I think he'll be caught out."

In the mid-1990s, Nitschke helped four of his patients die under the world's first euthanasia law, in Australia's Northern Territory, using computer software he had designed.

The territory's law was subsequently overturned by the federal government.