A major new search has been launched to find fugitive Dezi Freeman – or his remains – almost two months after investigators ended their last effort to find him.

More than 100 police and volunteers will hunt for the man near an area searched in December, more than five months after two officers were fatally shot at Freeman’s property.

Victoria police said the new five-day search was based on “intelligence derived from information police obtained in relation to a gunshot heard a short time after the fatal incident at Freeman’s Rayner Track property” in August.

Freeman has been at large after allegedly shooting dead police officers Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart as they served a warrant at his home in the small Victorian town of Porepunkah in late August.

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More than 400 police were deployed in the days after the killings, however they failed to uncover any trace of the 56-year-old, who was last seen fleeing into dense bushland in the alpine region shortly after the shooting.

The new search is scheduled to go for five days and will focus on an area of Mount Buffalo national park about 300km north of Melbourne, near a similar search that took place in December, which encompassed thick bush and heavy terrain.

Police said detectives have held a range of firearms tests in the vicinity as part of the inquiries, which led to the new search as well as the one in December.

There was nothing to indicate that Freeman was being aided by a specific person but police said that remained a possibility. A NSW police cadaver dog will also be used in the search but police said they were not assuming Freeman was dead.

Adam Tilley, a detective inspector with a taskforce focused on finding the man, said: “It remains our number one priority to locate Freeman and the extensive and systematic searches conducted over the past five months are testament to this.

“The same three possibilities remain open to us – Freeman is either dead, being harboured, or has gotten out from the area and surviving alone.

“At this time there is no intelligence to move us away from these possibilities or to make any one the more likely scenario, so we have to keep an open mind.

“I want to reaffirm that Victoria police remains committed to doing everything we can to locate Desmond Freeman.”

Detective Senior Constable Thompson, 59, was just a week away from retiring when he was killed, while Senior Constable De Waart-Hottart, 34, was on temporary assignment to the area.

Investigators in December said they had shifted their search efforts to finding the body of the self-described “sovereign citizen”, however a five-day effort to scour the bush with cadaver dogs and drones yielded nothing.

Teams on foot also conducted line searches and cleared caves in the heavy terrain.

Detectives from Taskforce Summit, formed in October, have investigated thousands of pieces of intelligence, including numerous tip-offs from the public.

People in the area have been advised to remain vigilant and not approach the fugitive, who is considered armed and dangerous, in the event of a sighting.

Victoria police have offered a $1m reward and the possibility of indemnity for information leading to his capture – the largest reward in the state’s history for facilitating an arrest.