By Daily Times Reporter;
A deadly shooting during an annual Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday left 15 people dead, marking Australia’s worst mass shooting in nearly three decades.
Authorities have launched a nationwide investigation into how the gunmen planned and carried out the attack, as Australia mourns the victims and grapples with renewed concerns over extremist violence and security failures.
Australian government and local authorities did not confirm the father’s ethnic origin. While Indian media reports claim that the father was of Pakistan origin, reports from Pakistan media said an unrelated man sharing the same name as the suspect was wrongly identified on social media and feared for his safety due to misinformation.
However, Philippine immigration later said the pair spent most of November in the Philippines, entering the country on November 1 and leaving on November 28. Officials said the father entered as an Indian national, while the son held Australian nationality.
This comes after the Australian police said on December 16 they were investigating why the suspects travelled to the Philippines a month before carrying out a mass shooting at Bondi Beach.
“The reasons why they went to the Philippines, and the purpose of that, and where they went, is under investigation at the moment,” New South Wales Police commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters.
What was the motive of Bondi beach gunmen?
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said early findings suggest the attack was intended to spread fear among the Jewish community and was likely driven by extremist ideology linked to Deash. Police said they found improvised explosive devices and homemade Daesh flags in a car registered to Naveed Akram near the beach.
Albanese also confirmed the son had come to the attention of intelligence agencies in 2019 but was not assessed as an imminent threat at the time, raising questions about whether the attack could have been prevented.
What happened on the day of the attack?
Naveed reportedly told his mother on the day of the attack that he was heading out of the city on a fishing trip.
Instead, authorities believe that he was holed up in a rental apartment with his father plotting the assault.
Carrying long-barrelled guns, they peppered the beach and a nearby park with bullets for 10 minutes before police shot and killed 50-year-old Sajid.
Have Australian authorities released any other details?
Investigators confirmed the father held a firearms licence since 2015 and legally owned six weapons. Police also found a car registered to Naveed Akram parked near the beach in the aftermath of the shooting.
They found improvised bombs and “two homemade flags” (related to Daesh), New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Tuesday (December 16).
How many casualties were reported?
Fifteen were killed, including a 10-year-old girl, a Holocaust survivor. Meanwhile, 42 others were rushed to hospital with gunshot wounds and other injuries.
What happened to the suspects? Where are they now?
The father, 50-year-old Sajid Akram, was shot dead at the scene, bringing the death toll to 16, while his 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, remains in a coma in hospital under police guard
