Bondi shooter trained ‘how to hunt’ at local gun club prior to terror attack - The Jewish Chronicle

Naveed Akram, one of the shooters who perpetrated the Bondi Beach attack on Sunday, trained in “firearms safety” and “how to hunt” at a local gun club prior to the massacre, it has emerged.

Naveed, 24, and his father Sajid, 50, opened fire on crowds celebrating Chanukah with the city’s Chabad branch, killing 15 people aged between 10 and 87.

It has since been confirmed by police that Sajid, an Indian national who came to Australia on a student visa in 1998, was a licensed gun club member and legal owner of six firearms.

Now, though, the president of the Zastava Hunting Association (ZHA), Vanja Kužet, has revealed that Naveed, who was not licensed to own firearms, undertook training at his club, which is associated with western Sydney’s Serbian community, five years ago.

Speaking to Serbian newspaper Blic, Kužet explained that Naveed had taken a course in “safety training, i.e. how to hunt in New South Wales”.

"We treated him like any other client. We neither support nor associate with such crimes and it is terrible what happened.”

He added that Australian Police had already contacted the association in connection with the investigation into the attack.

However, it appears that ZHA was not informed that Naveed had been linked by security services to Sydney’s underground pro-Islamic State networks the previous year. Prime Minister Albanese confirmed that he was known to Asio, Australia’s domestic intelligence service, as early as October 2019, but that a six-month investigation found that he did not present a threat to public safety.

Albanese has also promised Australia’s most significant tightening of gun laws since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

Proposed changes include a regular review of licenses and limits on the number of weapons individuals can own.

However, John Howard, who was prime minister at the time of the Port Arthur shooting, has insisted that the new laws should not act as a “diversion” from tackling rising antisemitism in Australia.

"I do not want this debate post this horrible event to be used, the focus on guns be used as a pretext to avoid the broader debate about the spread of hatred of Jewish people and antisemitism,” he told ABC.

"If the prime minister, immediately after the attack of the 7th of October 2023, had called an all-points cymbals and drum national press conference, convened a meeting of the national cabinet, he could have done that.

"From the beginning, people of the Jewish community would have felt there is somebody on their side. He didn't do that."

Howard also criticised Canberra’s decision to recognise a Palestinian State, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed “poured fuel on this antisemitic fire”, labelling it “needlessly provocative and dumb”.

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Topics:

Sydney terror attack

Australia