Australia has a number of poisonous spiders - Moment RF

Police in Australia responded to reports of a man screaming "why don't you die?" by dispatching multiple units to a home in Perth.

But officers were soon told to stand down when they found a man who “had only been trying to kill a spider", according to the police log published online.

The alarm was raised when a passer-by heard a screaming child and a man repeatedly shouting.

In a tweet on Wednesday morning Wanneroo police shared their account of the unusual incident.

It cited the man’s “serious fear” of spiders, and added that there had been no injuries at the scene apart from those sustained by the spider.

The now-deleted tweet by Wanneroo police

The tweet read: “Multiple police units responded lights and sirens to the incident this morning. Never a dull moment for the Police!”

A police spokesman, Samuel Dinnison, said: "It's just one of those jobs where you go expecting to see one thing and see another."

He confirmed the tweet was later deleted from Twitter because it pictured internal police communication systems and because “there were just some typos in it, things like that”.

The man was reported to have apologised “for the inconvenience” he had caused.

A similar incident occurred in 2015 , when police in Sydney found a man screaming “I’m going to kill you, you’re dead” at a spider in his home.