itstargetnews
Accused attacker in Sydney Bondi Beach Massacre was charged with 59 offenses including 15 counts of murder on Wednesday as hundreds of mourners gathered in Sydney to begin funerals for the victims.
Two gunmen slaughtered 15 people on Sunday in an anti-Semitic mass shooting at Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, and more than 20 other people are still being treated in hospitals. All those killed by the attackers identified so far were Jews.
As the investigation unfolds, Australia faces social and political reckoning over anti-Semitism, gun control and whether police protection of Jews at events like Sunday’s was sufficient for the threats they faced.
Accused shooter charged in hospital
Naveed Akram, the 24-year-old alleged killer, was charged on Wednesday after waking from a coma in a Sydney hospital, where he has been since police shot dead him and his father in 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 an act of terrorism, police said.
Akram is also charged with 40 counts of causing injury with intent to kill to the wounded and planting explosives near a building with intent to cause injury.
Police said the Akrams’ car, which was found at the scene of the crime, contained improvised explosive devices.
Akram’s lawyer did not enter a plea and did not ask for his client’s release on bail during a video court appearance from his hospital bed, the court said in a statement.
Akrama is 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 at the hospital until he is well enough to be transferred to prison.
Get daily national news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines delivered to your inbox once a day.
The father of 5 children who served in prisons was buried
Families from Sydney’s close-knit Jewish community gathered, one after another, to begin burying 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 of death, but funerals have been delayed due to coroner’s investigations.
The first farewell was Eli Schlanger, 41, a husband and father of five who served as assistant rabbi at Chabad-Lubavitch of Bondi and organized Sunday’s Hanukkah by the sea where the attack unfolded. London-born Schlanger has also served as a chaplain in prisons across New South Wales and at a hospital in Sydney.
“After what happened, my biggest regret was — besides, 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 he does and how proud we are of him,” said Schlanger’s father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, who spoke through tears at times.
“I hope he knew that. I’m sure he did,” Ulman said. “But I think it should have 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 number of people that are here how much he meant to the community,” Chlafma said. “He was warm, happy, generous, unique.”
Outside the funeral, not far from the site of the attack, there was a quiet and sombre mood, with a large police presence.
The authorities are investigating suspected links to the Islamic State group
Authorities believe the shooting was an “Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack,” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said Wednesday.
The Islamic State group is a fragmented and much weaker group since the US-led military intervention in 2019 drove it out of the territories it seized in Iraq and Syria, but its cells remain active and have inspired numerous independent attacks, including in Western countries.
Authorities are also investigating the suspect’s trip to the Philippines in November.
Muslim separatist militant groups, including the Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines, have once expressed support for IS and have hosted small numbers of foreign militants from Asia, the Middle East and Europe in the past. Philippine military and police officials say there have been no recent signs of foreign militants in the country’s south.
The leader promises action against guns and anti-Semitism
The news that the suspects were apparently inspired by the Islamic State group has raised more questions about whether the Australian government is doing enough to stop hate crimes, particularly aimed at Jews. Sydney and Melbourne, home to 85 percent of Australia’s Jewish population, saw a wave of anti-Semitic attacks last year.
After Jewish leaders and survivors of Sunday’s attack criticized the government for ignoring their warnings about the violence, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed on Wednesday to take all government measures necessary to combat anti-Semitism.
Albanians and some Australian state leaders have vowed to tighten the country’s already strict gun laws, the most sweeping reform since a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996. Mass shootings in Australia have been rare since then.
Albanese announced plans to further restrict access to guns, in part because the elderly suspect was found to have legally stockpiled six guns. The proposed measures include restricting gun ownership to Australian citizens and limiting the number of guns a person can hold.
Australians come together to mourn
Meanwhile, Australians looking for ways to make sense of the horror opted for practical works. Lines lasting several hours were recorded at blood donation sites, and on Wednesday at dawn hundreds of bathers formed a circle on the sand where they observed a minute of silence. Then they fled into the sea.
Not far from there, part of the beach remained behind police tape as the investigation into the massacre continued, shoes and towels abandoned as people fled and still scattered on the sand.
One event that would come back to Bondi was the Hanukkah celebration targeted by the attackers, which has been going on for 31 years, Ulman said. It would go against the attackers’ desire to make people feel as if it is dangerous to live as Jews, he added.
“Eli lived and breathed this idea that we can never let them not only succeed, but every time they try something we get bigger and stronger,” he said.
“We will show the world that the Jewish people are invincible.”
