2024-04-15 06:50:00
ASIA/PACIFIC 15.04.24 09:50 efsyn.gr
Eight adults and the baby whose mother was killed remain in the hospital
Australia is in mourning after yesterday’s attack in a busy shopping center in Sydney, while the authorities are trying to identify the motive of 40-year-old Joel Causti. The police believe that he seems to have mainly targeted women. Five of the six dead and many of the injured were women.
“It’s clear and it’s clear to investigators that this is a point of interest: the offender focused on women and avoided men,” Karen Webb from the New South Wales division told the ABC.
“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they? It is certainly a key element of research for us,” he added. Videos posted on social media show the attacker mainly going after women during the attack.
But Webb emphasized that police cannot know what was going through the attacker’s mind. “That’s why it’s important that investigators have time to take statements from those who knew him,” he explained.
His parents said he had suffered from mental health problems since he was a teenager. They called their son’s actions “truly horrific” and expressed their support for the victims. “We are still trying to understand what happened,” they said and texted the police officer who killed their son. “She did her duty to protect others and we hope she is OK.”
Nine people in the hospital
The last of the six victims of this attack was identified today as Yishuang Cheng, a young Chinese student at the University of Sydney. The other women killed were a stylist, a volunteer lifeguard, another girl.
And Ashley Good, the woman who gave her bloodied daughter to strangers before she was taken to hospital where she succumbed to her injuries. “We can report that after a long surgery yesterday, our baby is doing well,” her family announced.
“Words cannot express our gratitude” to “the two men who held and cared for our baby when Ashley could not.”
Eight people remain in hospital, some in a critical condition, while four have been discharged in the past 24 hours, according to NSW Health Minister Ryan Parke.
The only man killed was a 30-year-old Pakistani man, Faraz Tahri, who had arrived in Australia a year ago as a refugee and worked for the mall’s security service.
Day of mourning
Outside the center building, a crowd of passers-by have left thousands of flowers and wreaths. Flags are flying at half-mast across Australia as state Premier Chris Means declared Monday a national day of mourning.
The country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he had spoken with the families of several victims. “The gender of the victims is certainly a matter of concern,” he told ABC radio, promising the police investigation would be exhaustive.
Albanese criticized the spread of fake news through social networking sites. Some users mistakenly reported it was a terrorist act, while an Australian television network was forced to apologize for identifying a 20-year-old student as the perpetrator of the attack.
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