A father and son were driven by “Islamic State ideology” when they fired on crowds at Bondi Beach in one of Australia’s deadliest mass shootings, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said yesterday.
Sajid Akram and his son Naveed opened fire on people thronging the famous beach for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah on Sunday evening, killing 15 people and wounding dozens more.
Authorities said the attack was designed to sow panic among the nation’s Jews, but have so far given little detail about the gunmen’s deeper motivations.
Photo: Reuters
Albanese gave one of the first hints that the pair had been radicalized by an “ideology of hate.”
“It would appear that this was motivated by Islamic State ideology,” Albanese told national broadcaster ABC.
The pair traveled to the Philippines before the shootings and authorities are investigating whether they met Islamist extremists during the trip, Australian media reported.
The Philippine Bureau of Immigration confirmed that the pair spent almost all of last month in the Philippines, with their final destination listed as Davao.
The province, on the southern island of Mindanao, has a long history of Islamist insurgencies against central government rule.
Indian police said that Sajid Akram was an Indian citizen, who had left his home in the city of Hyderabad in the southern state of Telangana in 1998.
He had had “limited contact with his family” since, they said in a statement, adding that Naveed Akram is an Australian citizen.
Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who was visiting Israel yesterday, offered his “very sincere, deep condolences,” and said New Delhi condemns the attack “in the strongest possible terms.”
Police found a car registered to Naveed Akram parked near the beach, with improvised bombs and two “homemade” Islamic State group flags inside, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said.
Authorities are also facing mounting questions over whether they could have acted earlier to foil the attack.
Albanese said Naveed Akram, reportedly an unemployed bricklayer, had come to the attention of Australia’s intelligence agency in 2019, but was not considered an imminent threat at the time.
He 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.
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.
Naveed Akram, 24, remains in a coma in hospital under police guard.
Japan has deployed long-range missiles in a southwestern region near China, the Japanese defense minister said yesterday, at a time when ties with Beijing are at their lowest in recent years. The missiles were installed in Kumamoto in the southern region of Kyushu, as Japan is attempting to shore up its military capacity as China steps up naval activity in the East China Sea. “Standoff defense capabilities enable us to counter the threat of enemy forces attempting to invade our country ... while ensuring the safety of our personnel,” Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. “This is an extremely important initiative for
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
RSS