Sajid Akram, 50, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, accused of killing 15 people in Sydney's famed Bondi Beach, visited the Philippines last month, Philippine immigration authorities said.
Sajid Akram, one of the suspects in the recent mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia, is a native of Hyderabad, the Telangana Police told PTI on Tuesday.
According to a statement from the office of the Telangana Director General of Police, Akram migrated to Australia 27 years ago and maintained only limited contact with his family in Hyderabad.
The police said the factors that led to the radicalisation of Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed Akram, appear to have no links to India or any local influence in Telangana.
Akram completed his B.Com degree in Hyderabad before moving to Australia in November 1998 in search of employment, the statement added.
Philippine authorities have said they are investigating the matter.
IES, ISIS-linked flags found in suspect's vehicle
NSW said a vehicle, registered to the younger suspect, contained improvised explosive devices as well as two homemade flags linked to ISIS, a militant group designated as a terrorist organisation by Australia and several other countries.
Earlier, ABC News, citing security sources, reported that the gunmen had travelled to the Philippines in the month prior to the Bondi Beach shooting, allegedly to undergo “military-style training.”
“I can confirm that they did travel to the Philippines. The reasons why they went to the Philippines and the purpose of that and where they went when they were there is under investigation at the moment,” NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon said.
Police said the suspects had told family members they were going on a weekend fishing trip but were instead staying at a short-term rental in Campsie, where they were allegedly planning the attack. Counterterrorism officers later searched the property and recovered two firearms as part of the ongoing investigation, as cited by the Sydney Morning Herald.
Lanyon said there was no indication that any security alert had been triggered when the pair travelled to the Philippines.
“I don’t believe it was an intelligence failure at all,” he said.
Authorities said the attack was intended to sow panic among the nation’s Jews, though they have so far provided few details about the gunmen’s underlying motivations.
Radicalised by ideology of hate, says Albanese
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese offered one of the first indications on Tuesday that the pair had been radicalised by an “ideology of hate.”
"It would appear that this was motivated by Islamic State ideology," Albanese was quoted as saying by ABC News.
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What we know about the shooters of Bondi beach attack - one killed, another critical"With the rise of ISIS more than a decade ago now, the world has been grappling with extremism and this hateful ideology," he added.
Albanese said Naveed Akram, described in local media as an unemployed bricklayer, had come to the attention of Australia’s intelligence agency in 2019, but was not assessed as posing an imminent threat at the time.
"They interviewed him, they interviewed his family members, they interviewed people around him. He was not seen at that time to be a person of interest," Albanese said.
Sajid, who arrived in Australia on a student visa in 1998 and later held a resident return visa, was shot dead at the scene. Lanyon said he was a fruiterer who held a firearms licence for recreational hunting, legally owned six guns, several of which were taken to Bondi, and was a member of a gun club.
Fifteen people were killed when the two gunmen targeted Jewish attendees at a Hanukkah event, including a 10-year-old girl, a British-born rabbi, a retired police officer, and a Holocaust survivor. Twenty-five others remain hospitalised, with six in critical condition.
Bondi Beach and the surrounding area remained an active crime scene on Tuesday, with forensic and ballistic investigations still underway, Lanyon said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
He added that the area is expected to reopen to the public by Wednesday afternoon, as cited by CNN.