The perpetrator carried on a large knife and ran around the large Westfield Bondi Junction shopping center at around 4pm on Saturday local time. Several people were attacked before the man was shot dead by a police officer on the spot.
“She followed him and then he turned towards her and she shot,” says police officer Anthony Cook at a press conference.
The police believe that the perpetrator acted alone. So far, he has been identified as a 40-year-old man who is certainly known to the police from before, but who is not considered to have any connections to terror.
The Westfield Bondi Junction mall has seven floors and is a major hub in eastern Sydney, in an area where many people move, not least during Saturday shopping.
Rohan Anderson was at a gym in the mall and saw the suspect attack.
“I saw people running around and went to see what was happening. Behind all these running people was a man with a knife who very randomly started running towards people. I went back into the gym which locked the doors and then we heard several gunshots,” he told TT on the street outside, shortly after the attack.
On a film that Rohan Anderson saw a man jogging around randomly lunging at people with a large knife. The man was wearing gym shoes, shorts and a sports shirt.
A woman whom TT spoke to outside the mall also said she saw a man with a hunting knife:
“I saw people running, everyone started screaming and we locked ourselves in a store.”
According to her, the man was in his 30s and 40s, and she says that people must have been stabbed on several floors inside the shopping centre.
Reese, who lives in the area, was on her way to Pilates in the building when she heard multiple gunshots and people yelling “knife attack.” She started running herself and at the same time shouted at others to stay in the shops.
“I’m afraid. It is the first time that something like this has happened here,” she tells TT.
“I saw a baby being taken into an ambulance.”
The injured child is nine months old and is being cared for in hospital.
Its mother, a 38-year-old woman, was badly injured and bleeding profusely when she made her way to some people standing nearby and gave them the baby to take care of, the people themselves told Australian media.
The woman then died in hospital as the sixth fatality.
