Six people have been killed in a stabbing in Sydney Westfield Bondi Shopping centre. Source: Sardaka via Wikimedia Commons.
NSW police have confirmed six people were killed by an attacker and others injured in Sydney’s Bondi Junction Westfield on Saturday afternoon.
Shortly after 4pm, shoppers noticed people running, as Joel Cauchi, 40, moved through the shopping centre with a knife, stabbing people.
Many shops went on lockdown, as nine people were stabbed at the scene and taken to the hospital.
Cauchi was shot dead by Inspector Amy Scott, who was nearby the scene checking liquor licences at local hotels before the attack.
“We were just in the back room, on the phone with police, trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Max Barnsley, a worker on the fifth floor.
“[We just heard] screaming, screaming and it didn’t seem that long before we heard ‘boom boom boom’ of the gunshot and we thought, ‘We hope it’s the police,'” a witness told the ABC.
Among those known to have lost their lives include 30-year-old Faraz Tahir, a Pakistani national who was a security guard, 38-year-old Ashlee Good, a pregnant mother with a 9-month-old baby, 25-year-old Dawn singleton — daughter of millionaire businessman John Singleton, 55-year-old Pikria Darchia, and 47-year-old Jade Young.
The shopping centre will remain closed today until further notice. Shoppers were told to leave their cars at the shopping centre until they were notified it was safe to retrieve them.
NSW police say that the investigation could take “weeks and months” to examine the statements of hundreds of witnesses and hours of video tapes.
A brief of all the evidence will be presented to NSW coroner.
It is believed that Cauchi may have had been dealing with mental health problems, according to NSW police and family members of Cauchi.
“We are continuing to work through the profiling of the offender but very clearly to us at this stage it will appear related to the mental health of the individual,” the NSW police assistant commissioner, Anthony Cooke, said.
“There is still to this point nothing – no information we have received, no evidence we’ve recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered – that would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation, ideology or otherwise.”
NSW police have urged anyone who was at the shopping centre on Saturday or has any information about the incident to contact Crime Stoppers.
