A man only identified so far as a 40-year-old killed 6 people and injured eight others in a knife attack in a Sydney mall:
The man stabbed shoppers as he moved through the shopping centre – including a mother and her nine-month-old baby.
– Video footage appears to show a shopper confronting the attacker on an escalator in the centre by holding a bollard [see this] towards him.
– Emergency services were called to Westfield Bondi Junction at around 3.30pm, following reports that multiple people had been stabbed.
– A female police officer who was nearby went into the centre alone and approached the attacker who had by this point moved to level five of the shopping centre.
– The officer shot the attacker after he turned to face her, raised a knife and lunged at her.
– The officer conducted CPR on the attacker until the arrival of paramedics, who worked on the man; however, he could not be revived.
Knives can be very very deadly, and of course just about everyone possesses one. Five of the six dead are women; I don’t know how many of the injured are women. Did the killer target women, or is it just that most of the mall shoppers were women?
In addition, we have this statement:
Police did confirm the attacker acted alone and was known to them. They also said that they do not believe his motive was related to terrorism.
“If it is the person we believe it is, we don’t have fear for that person holding an ideation,” Webb said.
“In other words, that it’s not a terrorism incident.
“We believe that this person acted alone and there’s no ongoing threat to the community.”
I’ll believe it when you tell me more about the attacker – his name and his history, for starters. He could be a random crazy. Or he could indeed be a terrorist, although a free-lancer.
The baby is in critical condition; the mother has died. Absolutely horrific.
The police officer who shot the killer is reported to have been at the mall on an unrelated matter. It’s a good thing she was there, because the death toll almost undoubtedly would have been higher if she hadn’t been already on the scene.
It might have been lower, however, if some of the regular shoppers had been armed, or if the assailant had the notion that they might be. Gun laws in Australia are quite strict:
In the last two decades of the 20th century, following several high-profile killing sprees, the federal government coordinated more restrictive firearms legislation with all state governments.
Gun laws were largely aligned in 1996 by the National Firearms Agreement. In two federally funded gun buybacks and voluntary surrenders and State Governments’ gun amnesties before and after the Port Arthur Massacre, more than a million firearms were collected and destroyed, possibly a third of the national stock.[1]
A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a “genuine reason” (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence[2] and must not be a “prohibited person”. All firearms must be registered by serial number to the owner.
In December 2023 National Cabinet agreed to implement a national firearms register within four years.
None of the articles I’ve seen mention whether the mall was a gun-free zone.
RIP to the victims.
UPDATE: Random crazed killer it is: the perp had a history of mental illness (schizophrenia) and obsession with weapons, especially knives.
We now have pretty good drugs for schizophrenia, but it’s not unusual for patients to make a decision to go off them without telling anyone. It’s possible that happened in this case, although that’s a total guess on my part.
Five women were killed and the sole male victim is said to have been a security guard. This makes me wonder once again whether the killer was targeting women.
And now, just a couple of minutes after writing the above paragraph, I read this:
Chilling footage showed Cauchi ignore a man who had bravely attempted to confront him during the attack.
Speculation has been raised the knifeman had been targetting women.
Today show host Karl Stefanovic said he had ‘no words’.
‘I don’t care what the excuses are, and I hope there’s a special place in hell reserved for him, given the fact that he walked past men, and didn’t do anything about it and attacked women,’ he said.
‘A woman with a baby.’
Seems to be young women he was intent on attacking – plus the baby. I haven’t read anything describing the victims who survived (they are now reported to number 12), and whether they were young women, too. One of the murder victims was Dawn Singleton, 25, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. She was engaged to marry her childhood sweetheart.
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