Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday confirmed that the perpetrators behind Sunday’s horrific mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration were motivated by Islamic State ideology.
The Prime Minister revealed that investigators found definitive evidence linking the two Bondi Beach suspects, identified as a 50-year-old father, Sajid Akram, and his 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, to extremist beliefs.
“It would appear that this was a deliberate act of evil,” Albanese stated, “and there is evidence that the Bondi Beach suspects, motivated by Islamic State ideology, intended to target the Jewish community during a time of celebration.”
Also, Australia’s New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed that search warrants executed at properties in Bonnyrigg and Campsie yielded significant material, including two homemade Islamic State (IS) flags found inside the suspects’ vehicle, three improvised explosive devices (IEDs) recovered from the scene, and a cache of six firearms, four of which were used in the massacre.
Authorities are also investigating a recent trip the pair made to the Philippines in November. Intelligence reports suggest the Bondi Beach suspects, motivated by Islamic State ideology, may have sought contact with extremist cells in the Mindanao region, a known hotspot for IS-linked activity.
Pan-Atlantic Kompass reports that the mass shooting on the famous beach left 15 innocent people dead, including a 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor.
The suspects, a father and son aged 50 and 24, used guns that were owned legally by the older man, whom officials in New South Wales state have named as Sajid Akram. He was shot dead at the scene, and his son was still being treated in a hospital on Tuesday, where Australian public broadcaster ABC said he had regained consciousness.
Police in the southern Indian state of Telangana confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that Sajid Akram was originally from the city of Hyderabad. In a statement, the police said he earned a degree in Hyderabad before migrating to Australia in November 1998, where he married a woman of European origin.
Sajid Akram held an Indian passport, while his son, Naveed, and his daughter were both born in Australia and are citizens of the country, the police said, confirming previous statements by Australian officials about the son’s nationality.
The Telangana police said the elder Akram had “limited contact with his family in Hyderabad over the past 27 years,” visiting six times since he migrated to Australia, “primarily for family-related reasons.”
The police statement said family members in India had “expressed no knowledge of his radical mindset or activities, nor of the circumstances that led to his radicalization, and that the son’s apparent radicalization appeared “to have no connection with India.”
