Bondi Junction stabbing: Multiple dead, injured in Sydney’s eastern suburbs as police probe terror links

Nasty news from Sydney, Australia this morning.  Bondi is an area with  a strong Jewish community  and the murders centred round an Israeli resturant in the shopping Mall. From Western Australia Today, The Age  and 9 News  

There are reports of up to six people dead in the stabbing and shooting in the Bondi Junction shopping centre.

Police responded to reports of multiple people stabbed at Bondi Westfield just before 4pm. Heavily armed tactical operations police responded and shot a male offender. There are unconfirmed reports of a second male offender at the scene. Police are still trying to gather information about motivation – terrorism links are being considered.

Officers from commands all over Sydney are expected to be deployed to the shopping centre in the coming hours, with an enormous crime scene to take up to two days to process.

Two men have just spoken to Nine News about helping a baby and its mother who were both bleeding. The pair, who indicated they were brothers, said they saw a man “run up to the woman with the baby”. “We got them into the store … rang for help,” one of the men said. The men said the baby’s mother had been stabbed, and they were trying to compress the baby’s wounds, including using shirts from the shop.

Video has emerged of a man wearing shorts and a sports jersey jogging inside the shopping centre, carrying a knife. An eyewitness who had been near a gym at the shopping centre saw the man, and told nine he looked “scattered and chaotic . . .He wasn’t going for anyone personally, you could tell it looked quite random, he was just

running around with his knife,”

Video obtained by 9News appears to show a man wearing a rugby league jersey holding a knife as shoppers flee.

Rakesh Sanga, 33, told the Herald he became “very panicked” by the sound outside his shop, Bondi Alterations, on level five of the shopping centre.

“I went to see what was happening,” he

said. “Police coming from the other side. The man coming with the knife … everyone running. We panic, and we go move to the other side of my store.”

He said the man, who was wearing a green T-shirt, threw the knife towards a mobile store and was shot by a policewoman. “I think she shot like two times or three times,” he said.

Photographs from the scene show a man, who appears to be dead, outside the shop. Good for her. And well done this man who also tried to tackle him. 

Meanwhile pray for the injured and bereaved, especially the baby stabbed in its pram.