The two gunmen who opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, this month also threw homemade bombs into the crowd, but the explosives did not detonate.
Two days before the attack, the suspects scouted the Bondi Beach area. And sometime earlier, they filmed themselves training with firearms in the countryside. They had also made a video in front of an Islamic State flag in which they appeared to discuss their motivations for the attack.
These details about the two men — a father and son whom the Australian authorities said were inspired by Islamic State, or ISIS — were included as part of charging documents filed by police against the surviving suspect. On Monday, the court ordered them to be released after local news media petitioned for them to be made public.
The release of the details comes as officials in Australia and abroad scramble to retrace the activities of the two men in the lead-up to their rampage. The men visited the Philippines shortly before the attack, raising questions about a possible resurgence of militancy in the southern part of the country. Officials in Hyderabad, India, where the father was born and grew up, have questioned his relatives who still live in the city.
The Australian authorities have identified the two suspects as Sajid Akram, 50, and his son, Naveed, 24. The father was killed at the scene and the authorities have charged the son with murder, terrorism and causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder.
The police document offers a fuller picture of the two men’s actions leading up to their attack, which killed 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl, and left dozens more wounded.
In addition to firing toward the crowd gathered at Bondi Beach for a Hanukkah celebration, the two men threw four homemade explosive devices into the crowd, the police said. The devices — which the police described as three pipe bombs and one tennis ball bomb — did not detonate.
The police discovered another large homemade explosive device in the trunk of a car parked near the beach that was registered in the son’s name, alongside two hand-painted Islamic State flags, which had been hung on the inside of the car’s front and rear windscreens, and visible to the public. The two men were armed with three firearms — two single-barrel shotguns and one Beretta rifle — the police said.
The police contend that the two men “meticulously planned this terrorist attack for many months,” pointing to evidence including videos that investigators later found on Naveed Akram’s iPhone.
The police document described one video, recorded in October, which showed the two men sitting in front of an image of the Islamic State flag, with four long-arm guns resting against the wall behind them. In the video, Naveed Akram appears to recite a passage from the Quran in Arabic, the police said. Then, he and his father “make a number of statements regarding their motivation for the ‘Bondi attack’ and condemning the acts of ‘Zionists,’” the police said. The police document does not provide more detail about what the two men said in the video.
Another video, also recorded in October, appeared to show the father and son training with firearms in a countryside location that the police believe is somewhere in the state of New South Wales. The video shows the two firing shotguns and “moving in a tactical manner,” the police said.
The police also said they believe the two men scoped out Bondi Beach two days before the attack. Closed-caption video shows two men — whom police believe to be the Akrams — driving to the beach on the night of Dec. 12 and walking along the same foot bridge from which they would open fire two days later. “This is evidence of reconnaissance and planning of a terrorist act,” the police said.
After the shooting on Dec. 14, the police searched the Akrams’ home in the suburb of Bonnyrigg in western Sydney and found a homemade wooden firearm, a long bow with 12 arrows and a copy of the Quran with some passages highlighted, the police said.
Officials spoke to Naveed Akram’s mother, who said that her son and husband had left about a week ago on what she believed was a holiday in the south of the state. Her son would call her each morning from a pay phone and discuss what he planned to do that day, she said, according to the police.
The police also searched a house in the suburb of Campsie, in which the two men rented a room this month. There, the police found gun parts, some of them 3-d-printed, more weaponry, a suspected homemade bomb, bomb-making equipment and two copies of the Quran.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
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