Police in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) have identified the assailant who stabbed six people to death at a busy Sydney shopping center on Saturday afternoon before he was shot dead.
Australia-born Joel Cauchi, 40, was responsible for the attack at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Bondi Junction, in the city’s eastern suburbs, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke told reporters at a media conference on Sunday Cauchi suffered from yet unspecified mental health issues and police investigators weren’t treating the attack as terrorism-related.
“We are continuing to work through the profiling of the offender but very clearly to us at this stage it would appear that this is related to the mental health of the individual involved,” Cooke said.
“There is still, to this point… no information we have received, no evidence we have recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered that would suggest that this was driven by any particular motivation – ideology or otherwise,” he added.
The attack at the shopping center, one of the country’s busiest and which was a hub of activity on a particularly warm fall afternoon, began around 3:10 p.m. and police were swiftly called, as Breitbart News reported.
Three women place flowers as a tribute near a crime scene at Bondi Junction in Sydney, Sunday, April 14, 2024, after several people were stabbed to death at a shopping center Saturday. Police have identified Joel Cauchi, 40, as the assailant. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
Six people — five women and one man, aged between 20 and 55 — were killed in the attack and 12 others remain in hospital, including a nine-month-old child, whose mother died during the attack.
Two of the six victims were from overseas and have no family in Australia, Cooke said on Sunday.