Two shooters slaughtered 15 people on Sunday in an antisemitic mass shooting targeting Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and more than 20 other people are still being treated in hospitals. All of those killed by the gunmen who have been identified so far were Jewish.
Naveed Akram, the 24-year-old shooter, was charged on Wednesday after waking from a coma in a Sydney hospital, where he has been since police shot him and his father at Bondi. His father Sajid Akram, 50, died at the scene.
The charges include one count of murder for each fatality and one count of committing a terrorist act, police said.
Akram was also charged with 40 counts of causing harm with intent to murder in relation to the wounded and with placing an explosive near a building with intent to cause harm.
Police said the Akrams' car, which was found at the crime scene, contained improvised explosive devices.
Akram's lawyer did not enter pleas and did not request his client's release on bail during a video court appearance from his hospital bed, a court statement said.
Akram is being represented by Legal Aid NSW, which has a policy of refusing media comment on behalf of clients. He is expected to remain under police guard in hospital until he is well enough to be transferred to a prison.
As investigations unfold, Australia faces a social and political reckoning about antisemitism and whether police protections for Jews at events such as Sunday’s were sufficient for the threats they faced.
A father of 5 who ministered in prisons is buried
Families from Sydney's close-knit Jewish community gathered, one after another, to begin to bury their dead. The victims of the attack ranged in age from a 10-year-old girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Jews are usually buried within 24 hours from their deaths, but funerals have been delayed by coroner’s investigations.
The first farewelled was Eli Schlanger, 41, a husband and father of five who served as the assistant rabbi at Chabad-Lubavitch of Bondi and organized Sunday's Chanukah by the Sea event where the attack unfolded. The London-born Schlanger also served as chaplain in prisons across New South Wales state and in a Sydney hospital.
“After what happened, my biggest regret was — apart from, obviously, the obvious – I could have done more to tell Eli more often how much we love him, how much I love him, how much we appreciate everything that he does and how proud we are of him,” said Schlanger's father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, who sometimes spoke through tears.
“I hope he knew that. I’m sure he knew it,” Ulman said. "But I think it should've been said more often.”
One mourner, Dmitry Chlafma, said as he left the service that Schlanger was his longtime rabbi.
“You can tell by the amount of people that are here how much he meant to the community,” Chlafma said. “He was warm, happy, generous, one of a kind.”
Outside the funeral, not far from the site of the attack, the mood was hushed and grim, with a heavy police presence.
Authorities are probing a suspected connection to the Islamic State group
Authorities believe that the shooting was “a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State,” Australia's federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett said Wednesday.
The Islamic State terrorist group is a scattered and considerably weaker group since a 2019 U.S.-led military intervention drove it out of territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, but its cells remain active and it has inspired a number of independent attacks including in western countries.
Authorties are also examining a trip the suspects made to the Philippines in November.
Groups of Muslim separatist terrorists, including Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines, once expressed support for IS and have hosted small numbers of foreign terrorists from Asia, the Middle East and Europe in the past. Philippine military and police officials say there has been no recent indication of any foreign terrorists in the country’s south.
