Davao City: Pictures of the Bondi gunmen will be plastered on at least 70 mosques in the Philippine city of Davao as local Muslim leaders seek to flush out information about what the father and son got up to in a month-long visit before killing 15 people in Australia.
Brandishing an A4 printout of Sajid and Naveed Akram’s images and their basic details on Sunday, the Davao region’s most senior Islamic cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Yusop Pasigan, told this masthead the men were “no good – not good people” and that his community members needed to call police with any information.
Sheikh Muhammad Yusop Pasigan in his office in Davao City with a printout about the Bondi shooters. Credit: Zach Hope
“We will post this above the doors of our mosques, front and back,” he said.
“One of the other measures being implemented is, if there are newcomers at the mosques, we will get their details and identification. If they resist and [cause trouble], we will call [local emergency number] 911.”
The Akrams’ movements during their supposedly brief excursions outside their budget hotel room in Davao from November 1 to November 28 are at the centre of a multipronged investigation by Philippine authorities, which has so far turned up only a handful of CCTV images.
The Philippines National Police confirmed Sajid, 50, visited one of the city’s many gun shops. They also confirmed other vision captured on a street camera of the pair appearing to be exercising in a slow jog and walk around an area of the hotel. Another video, first broadcast by the ABC, appeared to show Naveed, 24, walking very early in the morning near the hotel.
A police spokesperson on Sunday had no information about a News Corp report suggesting that one line of inquiry was a visit by two other Sydney men in Davao City that overlapped with some of the Akrams’ stay.
Though it is off the typical tourist trail, Australian tourists are commonplace in Davao. Many of them visit the city as part of surfing trips to the famed break of Siargao Island off Mindanao’s north.
Davao, like the Philippines, is mostly Catholic, but it is also the largest city on the Island of Mindanao, where Islamist militants have been historically active in places accessible by road. Homemade Islamic State flags were discovered in the car the Akrams used to travel to Bondi Beach for their December 14 shooting attack.
The Philippines government hit back last week at media reports that it believed portrayed Mindanao as a hub of violent extremism and terrorist training grounds, saying Islamic State-inspired groups had been “fragmented, deprived of leadership, and operationally degraded”.
A view of a mosque in Davao, the major city on the island of Mindanao.Credit: Getty Images
Staff at the GV Hotel, where the Akrams stayed for 27 days, said the men only left their room for one or two hours each day. If correct, this would mean they could not have travelled far from Davao, if at all.
Asked if there were extremist Islamist elements within the city itself, Sheikh Pasigan said he had “no information”.
He said he was scheduled to meet with another senior Islamic leader soon to share information and discuss ways to get information about the Bondi shooters into the Muslim community. He also suggested the leadership could conduct its own investigation to feed to police.
Regional police director Leon Victor Rosete said on Sunday that investigators were still conducting “backtracking operations” to identify any people the Akrams interacted with and to assess “possible links for support networks”.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
