Bondi shooting: Authorities probe accused men’s travel to ISIS siege city as Mossad warns of more attacks

Israel’s spy chief has warned of further deadly attacks against Jews following the Bondi massacre and has vowed Mossad will hunt down any perpetrators linked to Sunday’s mass shooting.

The comments come as further details emerge of recent travel to a known extremist hotspot in the southern Philippines by the accused father-son terrorists Sajid and Naveed Akram, raising questions about intelligence failures by Australian authorities.

Speaking at the President’s residence in Jerusalem while awarding excellence certificates to intelligence and special operations personnel, Mossad director David Barnea addressed what he described as Iranian efforts to target Israelis abroad.

“The criminal idea of terror targeting innocent civilians was and still is at the core of the security strategy of the current Iranian regime,” Mr Barnea said in front of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to Israel’s Ynet News, the Mossad Director also noted that “jihadist elements, ISIS and others, have also resolved to harm every Jew in the world”.

“Our hearts are with the families of the Australian victims. The aim of these terror attacks is to break our spirit. Our spirit will not be broken. We will continue to celebrate our holidays and live our lives in Israel and around the world,” Mr Barnea said.

“We will find the attackers and their Iranian handlers, and the jihadists wherever they flee, and we will hold them to account. Justice will be done and seen. They know this well. Light will overcome darkness.”

Authorities in both Israel and Australia have increasingly assessed that the Sydney attack was inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group and not directed by Iran’s regime.

This week the Philippines Bureau of Immigration confirmed the two alleged gunmen travelled together to the country on November 1 aboard Philippine Airlines Flight PR212 from Sydney to Manila and onward to Davao.

A spokesperson for the bureau said that Sajid Akram, 50, an Indian national and Australian resident, travelled on an Indian passport, while his son Naveed Akram, 24, an Australian national, used an Australian passport.

The duo reportedly spent four weeks in the southern province of Mindanao — Southeast Asia’s most notorious militancy hotbed — and allegedly sought terrorist training near the city of Marawi.

According to The Australian, the two men reportedly travelled from Davao by road to the city of Cagayan de Oro, and a few days later to the Muslim-majority town of Marawi which homegrown Islamic State militants laid siege to for five months in 2017.

It’s believed local investigators have begun piecing together the two men’s movements by tracing their credit card use and local SIM cards.

“The Bondi attack has exposed potential weaknesses in how information flows between intelligence agencies, state police, and administrative systems such as firearms registries,” argues John Coyne from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“We should all be paying attention to the early warning signs that appear in schools, workplaces, communities and digital spaces long before anything reaches a security threshold for ASIO or police,” he writes on ASPI’s Strategist blog.

Overnight the Reuters news agency has cited Indian police as saying that Sajid Akram was originally from the southern city of Hyderabad in Telangana State but had limited contact with his family there.

“The family members have expressed no knowledge of his radical mindset or activities, nor of the circumstances ‌that led to his radicalisation,” Telangana State Police said in a statement.

Telangana Police said the factors that led to the radicalisation of the two alleged gunmen “appear to have no connection with India or any local influence in Telangana”.

In its statement on Tuesday, Telangana Police said Sajid Akram visited India on six occasions, mainly for family-related reasons, since he migrated to Australia in 1998 and there was no “adverse record” on him before he ‍left India.