A Northern Territory police officer has been charged with murder over last weekend’s shooting of a 19-year-old Indigenous man, Kumanjayi Walker.

Walker died after he was shot at Yuendumu, 300km from Alice Springs, on Saturday night when two police officers went there to arrest him for breaches of his suspended sentence.

A 28–year old male NT police officer had been charged with one count of murder, NT police said on Wednesday night. The officer has been named as Constable Zachary Rolfe.

Police later confirmed Rolfe had been granted bail in an out-of-session local court hearing, and will appear again in Alice Springs on 19 December.

“The officer has been suspended on pay,” police said.

News of the charges were greeted with cheers when announced to the protestors gathered at rallies in Perth and Sydney last night – where hundreds staged a sit-in in the CBD near police headquarters.

Rallies were held in other capital cities, and small communities in central Australia.

At a candlelight vigil in Alice Springs, there were big cheers. Another rally is planned outside the police station again today, and a convoy of buses and cars left last late last night from Yuendumu. They had a police escort.

A charge of murder against a police office in relation to a death in custody of an Indigenous person is almost unprecedented, according to UTS associate professor of law, Thalia Anthony.

“The family and Warlpiri community at Yuendumu should take heart that their struggle for justice could not be ignored by the legal system,” said Anthony.

Questions have been asked about the way police and health officials dealt with the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and their ensuing treatment of the community, including Walker’s relatives, who had waited outside the police station for hours seeking answers about his condition.

Walker died in the station from his injuries but did not receive critical emergency care, and his family were not notified until hours after his death.

On Tuesday Northern Territory health officials defended their decision to leave Yuendumu in the hours before the police shooting, saying health staff had “raised safety concerns” on Saturday morning after a period of “community unrest”.

The Medical Retrieval and Consultation Care Centre, which handles all medical emergencies across central Australia, provided clinical advice to police at the time of the shooting but did not immediately call for an airlift.

By the time staff from the nearby Yuelamu health centre arrived, Walker had died.

He is the second Aboriginal person to die after being shot by police in the past two months. In September a 29-year-old Yamatji woman, Joyce Clarke, was shot outside a house in the Geraldton suburb of Kaloo and died soon afterwards in hospital.

On Tuesday the NT chief minister, Michael Gunner, met Warlpiri elders at Yuendumu and promised that the coronial investigation would be independent “and consequences will flow as a result”.

“Saturday night was an awful night and we will be working together for a long time about how we deal with that together,” Gunner told people gathered at Yuendumu. “But there are important things I can promise today. One of them is to guarantee there will be an independent investigation.”

The Northern Territory Police Association said in a statement following the announcement the officer had been charged that they were “continuing to support our member who has this evening been charged with murder, as well as his family, and all other officers involved in the critical incident at Yuendumu on Saturday 9 November.”

• This article was amended on 18 December 2019 to clarify a comment from professor of law Thalia Anthony.