Five people, including two children, were found bludgeoned to death in a Sydney home in a “horrific” mass murder with no apparent motive, Australian police said yesterday.
Police said the victims, discovered on Saturday in the Sydney suburb of North Epping, were believed to be four family members and a female relative.
“The injuries of all five people are quite definitely horrific,” Superintendent Geoff Beresford told Sky News.
“They’re all blunt trauma injuries to the upper body and to the heads of all the victims, which regrettably makes visual identification very difficult,” he said. “It was an extremely violent attack carried out, I guess, with some precision.”
Police said the bodies were believed to be a 45-year-old man and his wife, 43, their sons, aged 12 and nine, and the woman’s 39-year-old sister. They refused to identify the dead but media reports said two of the victims were Chinese-born Min Lin and his wife, Yun Li Lin.
The deaths were initially thought to be murder-suicide, possibly linked to a domestic dispute, but Beresford yesterday ruled out that possibility and admitted police were struggling to find a motive for the killings.
“It certainly is not a murder-suicide, it is simply, regrettably, the murder of five innocent people,” he said. “The motive is unclear at this stage, it certainly doesn’t bear the hallmarks of what you might call a traditional home invasion. Robbery does not seem to be the motive [but] we haven’t ruled it out.”
Media reports said that the eldest male victim had witnessed an armed robbery near his news agency in May, which netted A$1.2 million (US$935,000).
Beresford said police did not believe the two crimes were linked although all avenues were being investigated.
He said a female member of the family was due to return to Australia from abroad yesterday and police would seek her help in the search for a motive.
Neighbor Pamela Burgess described the family as “normal.”
“They’re a family of five, their kids went to the local school,” she told reporters. “They were very nice, they were normal.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS