Bondi shooter Sajid Akram visited Philippine gun shop before attack, police say
Police retrace Sydney shooters’ steps in Davao City as CCTV shows Sajid Akram at a gun shop, but officials deny ample time for extremist training
An Australian counterterrorism team is investigating whether Sajid Akram and his son Naveed met with Islamist extremists during a nearly month-long visit to the southern island of Mindanao before the mass shooting that killed 15 people in Sydney six days ago.
The staff of Davao City’s GV Hotel said this week that the two men had stayed holed up in their small room for most of their 28-day stay, leaving only briefly each morning.
“What we’ve seen is one of them visiting a gun shop,” Davao regional police spokeswoman Catherine Dela Rey said on Saturday, adding later that it was 50-year-old Sajid Akram who had been seen.
“Our reviewing of CCTVs is ongoing so we can see the other places they visited and the people they could have spoken with,” she said.
While little has been made public at this stage of the investigation, National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano told reporters on Friday there was “no way” the men could have left the city to conduct training.
“They would go out and come back after two or three hours, the longest was eight hours, but still … that time window [would] not suffice for them to get out of Davao,” he said.