SYDNEY — Police have recognized the assailant who stabbed six individuals to dying at a busy Sydney procuring middle earlier than he was fatally shot by a police officer.
New South Wales Police stated Sunday that Joel Cauchi, 40, was accountable for the Saturday afternoon assault on the Westfield Buying Centre in Bondi Junction, within the metropolis’s jap suburbs and never removed from the world-famous Bondi Seaside.
NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke instructed reporters at a media convention on Sunday that Cauchi suffered from but unspecified psychological well being points and police investigators weren’t treating the assault as terrorism-related.
“We’re persevering with to work via the profiling of the offender however very clearly to us at this stage it will seem that that is associated to the psychological well being of the person concerned,” Cooke stated.
“There may be nonetheless, up to now… no data we now have acquired, no proof we now have recovered, no intelligence that we now have gathered that will recommend that this was pushed by any explicit motivation – ideology or in any other case,” he added.
The assault on the procuring middle, one of many nation’s busiest and which was a hub of exercise on a very warm fall afternoon, started round 3:10 p.m. and police had been swiftly referred to as.
Six individuals — 5 girls and one man, aged between 20 and 55 — had been killed within the assault and 12 others stay in hospital, together with a 9-month-old little one, whose mom died in the course of the assault.
Two of the six victims had been from abroad and don’t have any household in Australia, Cooke stated on Sunday.
Video footage shared on-line seems to point out many individuals fleeing as a knife-wielding Cauchi walked via the procuring middle and lunging at individuals.
Different footage exhibits a person confronting the attacker on an escalator within the procuring middle by holding what seemed to be a put up in direction of him.
Cauchi was shot useless by a lone feminine police officer on the scene.
Talking to reporters on Sunday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated the officer was “actually a hero” who’s actions had saved many extra lives.
“The great inspector who bumped into hazard by herself and eliminated the menace that was there to others, with out serious about the dangers to herself,” he stated.
“We additionally see the footage of bizarre Australians placing themselves in hurt’s means with a view to assist their fellow residents. That bravery was fairly extraordinary that we noticed yesterday,” he added.
The procuring middle stays closed on Sunday and will probably be an energetic crime scene for days, police stated.