Declared Terrorist Incident, Bombs Found

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said the number of casualties had grown as hospitals provided updates, with a total of 29 people injured.

“We know that there were many people there to celebrate a happy occasion—the celebration of Hanukkah. And there was well over 1,000 people there when this took place,” he said.

“As a result of the circumstances of the incident tonight, at 9:36 p.m. this evening, I declared this to be a terrorist incident.”

Shortly after the attack, officers located a vehicle parked on Campbell Parade that they believe may contain improvised explosive devices.

“We have our rescue bomb disposal unit there at the moment working on that,” Commissioner Lanyon said.

Asked whether either of the alleged gunmen were known to police or ASIO, he said it was too early to confirm, but the timing of the attack, the weapons used, and the items recovered justified the terrorism designation.

When pressed about how two men could carry out an attack involving firearms, potential explosives, and the possibility of a third person, he defended police preparedness.

“Well, I think if you think about the size of the community here, our police do a fantastic job day in, day out,” he said.

“You see the work that we do to prevent crimes happening. We need intelligence to actually do that. As I said, the person that we know has very, very little knowledge to the police. So he’s not someone that we would have automatically been looking at at this time.”

The two injured police officers remained in surgery late Dec. 14, with Commissioner Lanyon saying their condition was “serious, verging on critical.”

Commissioner Lanyon said ages of victims could not yet be confirmed due to the scale of the emergency response.

“As you can imagine, there has been a fair dislocation. [The] ambulance service responded brilliantly,” he said. “They’ve had to convey people right around the city to numerous hospitals. So at this stage we don’t have those details.”

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