One week after Australia’s worst mass shooting attack since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, questions about how the accused father-son duo stayed under the radar of intelligence agencies remain unanswered.
By nature, intelligence and law enforcement investigations keep details about how they conduct intelligence-gathering operations, both covert and overt, a tightly held secret.
But as the wider community grapples over how last Sunday’s Bondi attack could claim the lives of 15 innocent people on one of the world’s most famous beaches, the demand for information on what agencies knew and did, and what they didn’t, is inevitable.
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The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was the first to indicate something might have gone awry when he told ABC radio on Wednesday that “quite clearly” there were issues.
“We need to examine exactly the way that systems work. We need to look back at what happened in 2019 when this person was looked at, the assessment that was made,” he said.
The younger alleged shooter, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, came under the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s radar in October 2019 for alleged associations with individuals involved in a reported Islamic State cell.
Asio looked at Akram for a period of six months, Albanese said on Monday, but concluded he was not an ongoing threat.
Asio ‘cannot surveil’ everyone forever
The following day, the New South Wales police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, confirmed Naveed and his 50-year-old father, Sajid, had travelled to the Philippines only weeks before their alleged attack on the Chanukah by the Sea event at Bondi.
Between 1 November and 28 November, the father-son duo stayed in a room at GV Hotel – a budget hotel in Davao City, the main city of the southern province of Mindanao. Hotel staff told the Guardian the suspects rarely left their hotel except for an hour or so at a time during the four-week visit.
The choice to travel to Mindanao paints a potentially darker picture.
The southern island’s more remote regions, west of Davao, are at the centre of the country’s pro-Islamic State and Islamist militant groups. Ongoing investigations are examining whether the trip was directly linked to any preparations for their alleged attack.
Critics have questioned whether Asio’s look at Naveed’s associations six years prior should have triggered a movement alert warning. If they should have, was information properly shared between authorities?
Prof Michele Grossman is a founder of the Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism (Avert) research network. Grossman said questioning why Asio hadn’t kept constant surveillance on Naveed for six years after ruling him out as a ongoing threat was the wrong question to be asking, and that the focus should now be on what he has been doing since then
“Agencies look at thousands and thousands of people who are associates of, or otherwise on the periphery of, various investigations,” Grossman told Guardian Australia.
“They cannot surveil them all continuously over a long period. They have to prioritise, and they should prioritise.”
The links to Islamic State are still being examined as of this weekend. But the Australian federal police commissioner, Krissy Barrett, said more evidence had emerged by Friday – an IS-run video stream claiming it was the inspiration behind the attacks.
Introspection ahead for intelligence community
Like a jigsaw puzzle, the nightmarish painting slowly forms piece by painstaking piece.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, told ABC’s 7.30 he had “full confidence” in Asio’s decisions relating to Naveed Akram.
In his five annual threat assessments since becoming Asio’s director general, Mike Burgess has pointed to an increasingly complex national security environment.
Counter-terrorism remains the priority due to the potential for mass casualty events but an increase in foreign interference and espionage interest in Australia poses a different kind of problem, requiring the agency’s eyes to scan and monitor a wider threat landscape.
The face of counter-terrorism has changed too. Where it was once focused primarily on Islamist terrorist groups and ideologies, a rise in politically motivated groups, including neo-Nazis and sovereign citizens, has added to the workload.
Asked whether Asio had “downgraded” their capabilities on Islamist counter-terrorism in recent years due to the rise of other threats, Burke dismissed the characterisation.
Rory Medcalf, the head of the Australian National University’s National Security College, said there were likely resource trade-offs but “whenever a new threat arises, it’s not as if the old ones go away”.
“I don’t think it’s fair to say that [Asio has] ever taken its eye off terrorism,” Medcalf said.
“But you can assume that there are constant resource trade-offs being made, both in Asio and the AFP.”
Nevertheless, Medcalf said how the Bondi incident slipped through will be the cause of “very deep introspection” for security and intelligence agencies.
The sensible next option, Medcalf said, is to announce a short inquiry that looks at the agencies’ operations but also the context in which they work.
The aim will, of course, be on what can be learned to prevent an incident like this from ever happening again.
However, Grossman said it was not a “realistic expectation” to think that every terrorist attack can be prevented.
Speaking generally, the radicalisation expert said there might be three reasons why the alleged shooters apparently weren’t detected by Asio or other agencies in the lead-up to their attack.
The rarity of a father-son duo terrorist attack likely would have prevented “leakage” – clues, typically online or through digital communication, that authorities might have been alerted to.
Sajid, the father, also acquired his firearms legally, avoiding tripping any intelligence wires that might have put him more in focus, Grossman said.
And finally, the pair appeared to have deliberately deceived those closest to them.
In comments to the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this week, Naveed’s mother said she was told they were on a fishing trip on NSW’s south coast. There appeared to be no mention of the Airbnb the two hired in Campsie, in Sydney’s south-west, a 20km drive from Bondi beach.
“Nothing from 2019 would have shed any light on those three circumstances,” Grossman said.
For now, many more questions remain than answers. Until an inquiry – and preferably one guaranteeing an unclassified report is released publicly – is announced, the public will rely on piecing together the crumbs of information.