Albanese rules out link between gunmen and wider terrorist cell

Investigators in Australia have dismissed suggestions that two gunmen who opened fire on a crowd celebrating a Jewish festival in Sydney on Sunday, killing 15 people and injuring dozens, were part of a wider terror network.

- Jason Burke

The alleged gunmen Naveed Akram, top, and Sajid Akram

The antisemitic terrorist attack, which targeted a crowd celebrating Hanukah at an event on Bondi beach, is the worst mass shooting in the country for 29 years. It has prompted a flood of global support but also some fierce criticism of Anthony Albanese's Labor government.

The dead included a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor. About 40 were injured, some seriously, including two police officers.

One of the alleged attackers, named by local media as 50-year-old Sajid Akram, was shot dead by police at the scene. The second alleged attacker, his son Naveed Akram, 24, was arrested and taken to hospital with critical injuries.

Mal Lanyon, the New South Wales police commissioner, said yesterday that police expected to bring criminal charges against the surviving suspect but would not comment on reports that a manifesto or black Islamic State flag were found in a car driven to the scene.

Lanyon said the two men lived in Bonnyrigg, a neighbourhood in the city's west, in a house that was raided on Sunday night. He defended the failure of security services to foil the attack, saying there was nothing "to indicate that either of the men involved in yesterday's attack was planning the attack" but confirmed the older man had held a gun licence for a decade.

Albanese said there was "no evidence that these people were part of a cell". He added: "Clearly, they were motivated by this extremist ideology, and further detail, of course, will be released when the police go through their work."