‘We were like sitting ducks’: How the Bondi Beach massacre unfolded
The massacre unfolded over roughly nine or 10 minutes.
It began as the sun was setting over a grassy park at the northern end of Australia’s iconic Bondi Beach, where hundreds had come together Sunday evening for the annual Chanukah by the Sea to mark the start of Hanukkah, the eight-day Festival of Lights. Families with children, young couples and elderly grandparents from Sydney’s Jewish community, all gathered for what was meant to be a night of peace and celebration.
The park has picnic shelters and a playground. There was a petting zoo for kids, face painting and a rock-climbing wall. It was warm, 29 C. As children petted rabbits and ate fried donuts, “music competed with the sound of crashing waves” from the Tasman Sea, the Associated Press reported.
At about 6:30 p.m., two men climbed out of a silver Hyundai Elantra hatchback near the footbridge leading over a car park to Archer Park, that grassy knoll. The two men, Australian residents identified as Sajid Akram, 50, and his 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, had reportedly rented an Airbnb in a suburb in New South Wales, about a 20 km drive from Bondi Beach.
They told their family they’d gone fishing, Agence France Press reported.
Carrying three long arm rifles, the two men — the son dressed in black, the father in white pants and a long-sleeved black shirt — walked to the concrete footbridge overlooking the Jewish celebrations. Its chest-high walls sheltered the shooters from the east and west, AFR reported.
One rifle was set on the ground before the shooters aimed their guns and began firing at around 6:47 p.m. into the crowd from a distance of some 50 metres, the Guardian reported.
Amid the shattering of gunfire, panic took hold, the New York Times reported . One mother grabbed her 17-month-old and dove under a barbecue, pulling buckets of drinks on top of them. She prayed: “Please don’t let us die,” she told the Associated Press . “Please just keep my son safe.” A man a few centimetres away was suddenly hit by a bullet in the chest. “I’m dying,” he told the terrified young mother. “I can’t breathe.” As she tried to comfort him, her 65-year-old mother pressed cardboard against the man’s bleeding wound, AP reported.
He didn’t survive.
Other parents threw themselves over their children like human shields. Amid the pop-pop of gunfire, people began running for their lives. Some, fully dressed, ran into the sea while others scrambled to get out of the water. People fled the carnage, in every direction. “It just didn’t stop,” one woman told the Times. “We were so targeted in that little space. We were like sitting ducks.” The gunmen just kept reloading and firing, again and again, another survivor said. “They had a ridiculous amount of ammunition and multiple guns.”
Police arrived within minutes but witnesses said their handguns “seemed outmatched by the firearms carried out by the shooters,” the Times reported.
“Everybody as a whole was just kind of in a freakout. It didn’t feel real at the moment,” 18-year-old Finn Foster, of Brantford, Ont., told the Canadian Press. Foster and his girlfriend, who are backpacking in Australia, were heading to Bondi Beach when the heard gunfire. “Cars were pulling over,” he told CP. “(People) were hopping out and grabbing their kids.”
Sometime after 6:47 p.m., the older shooter — allegedly Sajid — moved off the footbridge to the grass, to get closer to the celebrations and to his targets. He began firing at point-blank range into the crowds, the BBC reported.
Then, in an extraordinary and dramatic moment captured by video and spread on social media, the shooter was tackled from behind by Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old father of two girls who risked his life by pouncing on the shooter from behind parked cars, grabbing him around the neck and single-handedly wrestling the gun from his hands and briefly turning the weapon on him without firing. As the shooter stumbled backwards, al-Ahmed placed the gun against a tree, then held his arm up, motioning for help.
However, about a minute after he was disarmed, the shooter walked back to the footbridge and began firing again with the third weapon before he was shot and killed.
The other shooter — believed to be Naveed — continued firing for another 90 seconds before he, too, was shot, the BBC reported.
Police and witnesses ran onto the footbridge. Video shows one man kicking one of the alleged shooters.
The 24-year-old was in hospital Monday, reportedly in a coma. He is expected to face criminal charges, police said.
After the shootings, “rescuers frantically pumped the chest of unmoving bodies on the grass, near a picnic table, an abandoned stroller and the petting zoo,” AP reported.
At least 103 shots were fired, about 80 from the two attackers, according to an analysis by the Financial Review.
Australia’s worst mass killing in nearly three decades and the worst antisemitic attack in its history has left at least 15 people dead, including 10-year-old Matilda, a sweet happy child “who never stopped smiling,” a Holocaust survivor, and 41-year-old Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a key organizer of Sunday’s gathering who had not a bad bone in his body and whose mission in life was “to bring the light of Judaism into the world,” extended family members in Toronto told CTV.
At least 42 people have been hospitalized.
Al-Ahmed, the hero who tackled one of the shooters, took two bullets, one each in the arm and hand. He remained in hospital Monday.
Australia has some of the strictest gun control measures in the world, enacting prohibitions against semi-automatic firearms and pump-action shotguns following a mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996.
The video of the massacre is blurry. However, from the size and shape of the guns the alleged terrorists fired, the weapons appear to be “the kinds of things people can buy legally in Australia,” said Canadian firearms writer Andrew Somerset.
They were fairly long and full-size, like a hunting rifle or shotgun, not compact and short, Somerset said. “My first impression is, you’re looking at an over/under shotgun, which is a double barrel shotgun, with the barrels configured vertically instead of horizontally.”
“If that is correct, a double barrel shotgun holds two rounds, and you have to reload it every time you fire two rounds,” said Somerset, author of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun.
“As far as them being able to get off as many shots as they did, even if you’re using a bolt-action rifle or a break-action shotgun, you would still be able to get off a lot of shots.
“Because there is nobody shooting back at you.”
Authorities said there was no evidence the two gunmen were acting as part of a wider terror group. “There’s no evidence of collusion, no evidence that these people are part of a cell,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in an interview with the Australian broadcaster, ABC.
Albanese also said his government will look at further strengthening gun control.
The shooters may have spent time at a shooting range, Somerset said. However, they weren’t moving tactically. “Nothing in the video suggests to me these people had any kind of para-military training,” he said.
“There is more than one path to prevent these incidents and simply saying ‘we’re not going to let people have guns’ is not going to solve the problem.
“You have to try to control these things by saying people can’t be antisemitic. You can start to go after the networks of people who publicly express support for groups like Hamas.”
National Post
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