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Australian authorities said Tuesday that the father and son who opened fire on families during a Hanukkah event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach had packed their vehicle with improvised explosive devices and homemade ISIS flags, deepening fears that the massacre was part of a broader attack plot than initially believed.
During a press conference, investigators called the father-and-son gunmen, ages 24 and 50, “cowards” who hunted Jewish Australians “in broad daylight.” Fifteen people were killed and more than two dozen were injured in the shootings, which police are now formally describing as an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack.
New South Wales Police confirmed the younger attacker’s vehicle contained IED’s and two homemade ISIS flags, evidence authorities said points directly to extremist inspiration and an apparent intent to carry out a larger, coordinated assault. Forensic teams are still conducting ballistic and chemical examinations of the items.
“This was a barbaric attack against Jewish Australians,” Australia’s federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett said. “They were hunted down in broad daylight.”
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Authorities said they are still working to determine whether the devices were functional or intended for secondary targets.
Mal Lanyon, the Police Commissioner for New South Wales state, said the suspects traveled to the Philippines last month. Their reasons for the trip and where in the Philippines they went would be probed by investigators, Lanyon said.
The region has long been home to ISIS-linked networks. Groups of Muslim separatist militants, including Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines, once expressed support for ISIS and have hosted small numbers of foreign militant combatants from Asia, the Middle East and Europe in the past.
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Decades of military offensives, however, have considerably weakened Abu Sayyaf and other such armed groups, and Philippine military and police officials say there has been no recent indication of any foreign militants in the country’s south.
Officials said there is currently no evidence that additional attackers or facilitators were involved in Sunday’s massacre but officials cautioned that this assessment could change as investigators review digital devices, travel records and thousands of seized documents.
Tuesday marked the first time that officials confirmed their beliefs about the suspects’ ideologies.
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There are more than two dozen people, ranging in ages from 10 to 87, still being treated in hospitals after Sunday’s massacre. Ten of them, including three who are patients in a children’s hospital, are in critical condition.
Among the injured is Ahmed al Ahmed, a 42-year-old Syrian-born fruit shop owner who was captured on video tackling and disarming one assailant, before pointing the man’s weapon at him and then setting it on the ground. He had surgery scheduled on Wednesday for shotgun wounds to his left shoulder and upper body.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who met earlier with Ahmed, hailed him as “a true Australian hero.”
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“We are a brave country. Ahmed al Ahmed represents the best of our country. We will not allow this country to be divided. That is what the terrorists seek. We will unite. We will embrace each other, and we’ll get through this,” Albanese added.
The older gunman was shot dead while his son was also being treated at a hospital on Tuesday.
Albanese and the leaders of some of Australia’s states have pledged to tighten the country’s already strict gun already strict gun laws in what would be the most sweeping reforms since a shooter killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996. Mass shootings in Australia have since been rare.
Officials divulged more information as public questions and anger grew on the third day following the attack about how the suspects were able to plan and enact it and whether Australian Jews had been sufficiently protected from rising antisemitism.
Albanese announced plans to further restrict access to guns, in part because it emerged the older suspect had amassed his cache of six weapons legally.
“The suspected murderers, callous in how they allegedly coordinated their attack, appeared to have no regard for the age or ableness of their victims,” Barrett said. “It appears the alleged killers were interested only in a quest for a death tally.”
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