Her parents called her Bee, because she loved bees. Matilda was ten years old, and she was one of the people who did not go home from Archer Park on the first evening of Hanukkah.
It was December 14, 2025. Around a thousand people had gathered above Bondi Beach for an event billed as “Hannukah by the Sea”. The candles had not yet been lit. Children were on the playground and adults stood around talking. Arsen Ostrovsky, who was queuing for food for his wife and their two daughters, aged nine and five, heard the first shot.
Shooting from the footbridge
Police say Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24, fired from the footbridge that leads into the park, shortly before 6.50pm. The height gave them a clear view of the crowd. Ostrovsky told a columnist who later walked the site with him that the pair were “hunting Jews”. By his account the shooting ran for ten minutes. People threw themselves behind picnic tables and trees or ran for the sand.
Boris and Sofia Gurman, a couple in their sixties who had been married for 34 years, tried to stop the gunmen and were the first to die. Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim born in Syria, was also unarmed. He wrestled a rifle away from one of the attackers and was shot several times afterwards, but he survived. Among the dead was an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who had emigrated from Ukraine. In all, 15 victims, aged 10 to 87, were killed, and roughly 40 more were injured. Sajid Akram was shot dead, which is why some counts give 16 deaths.
Ostrovsky was hit in the head beside a picnic table. He lay bleeding, sure he was dying, and sent his wife a selfie with a message saying he loved her. His family had run to shelter among the stored surfboards. Strangers got to him first: a nurse who crossed the road and held on until the ambulance came, a journalist with water, a young surfer who gave up his shirt as a bandage. “They ran towards the gunfire, not away from it,” he said.
What the court documents allege
Documents put before the Sydney Downing Centre on Monday, December 22 describe a plan that took months. Naveed Akram has been charged with 59 offences. Police allege that at about 2.14am on the day of the attack, CCTV from a rented Airbnb in Campsie shows the pair carrying weapons to their car. In the vehicle, they say, were two single-barrel shotguns, a Beretta rifle, two Islamic State flags and four home-made explosive devices.
The car was later filmed parked in Woollahra for around twenty minutes, with Sajid checking the boot. Police allege that three pipe bombs and a tennis-ball bomb were thrown toward the crowd. Officers who searched the vehicle afterwards found another improvised device in the boot.
Phones taken from the scene and from the family home in Bonnyrigg, investigators say, held videos from October. In one, the two men fire shotguns in the countryside and move in what police call a tactical manner. In another they sit before an IS flag with four long guns and explain, in the words of the court papers, their motivation for the “Bondi attack”, condemning “Zionists”. CCTV also appears to show them walking the footbridge two days earlier, on December 12, scouting the ground.
Naveed Akram was shot in the stomach and critically injured. He is expected back in court in April.
Sources
- Bondi Beach attack: New allegations in court documents about Naveed Akram and father Sajid | 7NEWS
- KINSELLA: Mass shooting survivor recalls two monsters 'hunting Jews' at Bondi Beach – Yahoo News Canada
