Bondi Beach shooting suspects visited Islamist militant hot spot weeks before attack, police say

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The two men who allegedly carried out Sunday’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach travelled to the Philippines in November, police said Tuesday, as more information continues to emerge about the suspects’ alleged extremist ties.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon also confirmed reports that homemade Islamic State flags were found in the car used by the suspects, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram.

“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,” he told reporters in Sydney.

At least 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in the massacre Sunday, which targeted a Jewish gathering at Bondi, where hundreds were celebrating the first night of Hanukkah.

Immigration authorities in Manila said the Akrams had entered the country on Nov. 1 and flew to Davao, capital of the southern island of Mindanao, from where they returned to Sydney on Nov. 28. According to Australian public broadcaster ABC, citing unnamed security sources, the two men received “military-style training” while in Mindanao, a known jihadist hot spot.

For decades, the almost 100,000-square-kilometre island was the base of Abu Sayyaf, an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that became notorious in the 1990s and 2000s for brazen kidnappings and bombings in Southeast Asia, killing hundreds of people.

In 2014, Abu Sayyaf pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, then at the height of its power in Syria and Iraq. Seeking to establish a wilayah, or state, of the caliphate on Mindanao, the late 2010s saw Abu Sayyaf fight multiple major battles with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), including the months-long siege of Marawi, which left hundreds dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

Manila declared an “all-out war” on Abu Sayyaf in 2019, and five years later, AFP said the group had been “dismantled,” with all but a handful of its leaders “neutralized.”

Extremism experts have cast doubt on that assessment, however, and late last year, Australia’s National Security agency warned Abu Sayyaf was “rebuilding its membership and influence in local communities, while continuing a low-level insurgency against Philippine security forces.”

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The agency also noted a continuing threat from other militant groups in the region linked to the Islamic State, as well as Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesia-based group with ties to al-Qaeda that also has a presence in the Philippines.

Rohan Gunaratna, a professor of security studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said that although the militant threat in Mindanao was “remarkably diminished,” it “has not ended.”

“Mindanao has several hundred radical extremist preachers, schools and mosques who continue to preach the Salafist-Wahhabi ideology that provides the foundation for extremism and terrorism,” he said.

That the two men travelled to a known militant hot spot weeks before the Bondi Beach massacre has raised more questions about what police and security services could have done to prevent the attack.

Naveed Akram, 24, was known to the authorities since 2019, when he was briefly investigated as part of a probe into Isaac el Matari, a radical preacher who was later convicted of plotting a terrorist attack in Sydney.

At the time, Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, found “no evidence” Mr. Akram was linked to Mr. El Matari’s plans, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday.

“This person was not on a watch list,” he said with regard to Mr. Akram. “He was investigated because of his connections with two people who subsequently – both of whom went to jail.”

Photos and videos surfaced by Australian media showed the younger Mr. Akram preaching on the streets of Sydney in 2019, when he was around 17 years old. In one video, uploaded by the Street Dawah Movement, he says, “Allah will reward you for whatever actions you do in his cause.”

Street Dawah Movement, which has since removed the video, distanced itself from Mr. Akram in a statement, saying it had not had any contact with him since 2019. The group said a key part of its message is to promote peace and harmony, and that it condemned his alleged actions.

Other social-media posts from the time suggest Mr. Akram also had connections to Dawah Van, another street group, run by controversial preacher Wissam Haddad. (Dawah, or “invitation” in Arabic, refers to the act of proselytizing for Islam.)

Dawah Van was stripped of its charity status earlier this year because of allegations it was radicalizing young men, while in July, Mr. Haddad was found guilty of breaching Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act in a series of lectures about Jews and the State of Israel.

Prof. Gunaratna said Mr. Haddad has long operated on the edge of the law, and accused him of having “radicalized an entire generation of Australians, some of whom travelled to Syria and Iraq.”

In a sermon from February, 2024, a video of which was viewed by The Globe and Mail, Mr. Haddad praised the concept of jihad, which he said was not just a spiritual effort but involved “fighting in the path of Allah” and “physically struggling against the enemies of jihad.”

Lawyers for Mr. Haddad – who has never been charged with terrorism offences – did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the ABC, he said he “vehemently denies any knowledge of or involvement in the shootings that took place at Bondi Beach.”

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Mainstream Muslim organizations in Australia have denounced the Bondi Beach attacks and expressed solidarity with the Jewish community. Representatives of Sydney Islamic groups have said they refused religious funeral rites for Sajid Akram, who was killed exchanging gunfire with police, with local activist Jamal Rifi telling News.com.au, “We don’t see them as inside the fold of Islam or as Muslims.”

The alleged extremist ties of the younger Mr. Akram have also raised questions about how his father was able to renew a recreational gun licence in 2023, years after his son came to the attention of the authorities, and build up the arsenal of weapons apparently used in Sunday’s attack.

National and New South Wales politicians have promised speedy action to tighten regulations, with NSW Premier Chris Minns citing Mr. Akram’s case Tuesday as justification for bringing in “the toughest gun laws in Australia.”