Sajid Akram’s family in India had no knowledge of his ‘radical mindset’

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As the race to piece together the profiles of father and son terrorists Sajid and Naveed Akram stretches across three countries, family members in India have gone to ground, neighbours are lying low and a misinformation campaign is raging online.

In the Indian city of Hyderabad, local and international media have descended on a multi-storey yellow cottage owned by the Akram family in the middle-class neighbourhood of Tolichowki.

The occupants are nowhere to be seen. The front gate has been locked with a chain, though shoes are visible at the doorstep and a dusty car parked in the driveway on Wednesday was removed overnight.

From the vantage point of the neighbour’s property, the Akrams’ home has signs of renovations, with broken tiles and debris visible on the first-floor balcony and a freshly painted wall.

Along the quiet cul-de-sac, neighbours are reluctant to be drawn into an international news event of such horror.

Next-door neighbour Zulekha, who wished to be known only by her first name, said she had barely seen anyone outside the Akram home in the five years she had lived on the street.

“They come out and leave in their cars – they barely talk,” she said.

“Since the last few days, my kids are worried and are asking me, ‘Why are all these people standing here with cameras?’”

Sajid Akram, 50, was an Indian citizen. He graduated with a commerce degree in Hyderabad, a sprawling tech and pharmaceuticals hub in the southern state of Telangana, before leaving for a new life in Australia on a student visa in 1998. His son, Naveed, 24, was born in Australia.

Indian authorities have been eager to emphasise that Sajid Akram’s ties to his home country disintegrated in the 27 years since he migrated to Australia. They have rejected any local link to the pair’s radicalisation, which culminated in a rampage at Bondi Beach on Sunday in which they targeted the Jewish community at a Hanukkah celebration, shooting dead 15 people and injuring dozens of others.

Naveed Akram, who is under police guard in hospital, has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder.

Sajid Akram, shot dead by a NSW police officer during the attack, had “no adverse” record in India before he left.

“The factors that led to the radicalisation of Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed, appear to have no connection with India or any local influence in Telangana,” the Telangana police said in a statement on Wednesday.

Sajid’s relatives in Hyderabad, who reportedly include his elderly mother and brother, have also rejected any knowledge of the pair’s terrorist inclinations, telling police they had had minimal contact over the years.

“The family members have expressed no knowledge of his radical mindset or activities, nor of the circumstances that led to his radicalisation,” the Telangana police said.

Sajid’s brother told Indian digital news platform The News Minute the family had cut ties with him when he married a Christian after leaving India. Their mother, who is an octogenarian, had been unwell, and Sajid had not even asked about her, the brother said.

Sajid had returned to India only six times in the years since he migrated to Australia, his family told police. His most recent visit was in 2022 for two weeks, The Hindu newspaper reported, citing local officials, adding he had not returned when his father died in 2017. Indian agencies had found in a preliminary probe that the brothers had a fallout over property when Sajid was in Hyderabad a few years ago, The News Minute reported.

Meanwhile, Australian police and counter-terrorism forces are under pressure to stitch together the footprint of the Akrams’ lives in western Sydney, including Naveed’s connections to extremist figures. In the weeks before Sunday’s mass shooting, the pair spent almost a month on the Philippine island of Mindanao, which in the past has been a hotbed of Islamic State insurgency, triggering speculation that the Akrams received terrorism training there.

It’s an association that Philippine authorities have rejected, with a spokesman for President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr saying there was no evidence the pair were in the country for extremist training.

The Pakistan government has also rejected any association with the terrorists and denounced a misinformation campaign that circulated false claims online that Naveed Akram was a Pakistani national.

In the hours after the attack, a Pakistani man also named Naveed Akram, who lives in NSW, released a video saying pictures had been stripped from his Facebook account and posted to social media identifying him as the Bondi shooter.

“I’m going to clearly tell everyone that that is not me and I have nothing to do with that incident or with that person. That is a different person,” he said in the video.

“So this issue is very serious and I’m very stressed and scared about this, and I cannot even go outside safely. So I just want everyone’s help to help me stop this propaganda.”

Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar accused “hostile countries”, including India, of boosting the false claims, which rapidly spread across digital platforms and were picked up by some media outlets without evidence or verification.

“This assertion was later proven to be completely false,” Tarar wrote on X on Wednesday evening.

“As Pakistan has suffered from terrorism for a long time, we fully understand the grief of the Australian people and express complete solidarity with them.”

More coverage on the Bondi terrorist attack

• Three days after: What we know about the Bondi terrorist attack
• The victims: ‘Too big for this world’: The father who died a hero at Bondi and ‘went down fighting’ gunman
• Analysis: Police were young and outgunned: Where was the back-up at Bondi?
• Guns in Sydney: The Sydney suburbs with the most guns, as overall numbers rise