Two alleged gunmen who killed 15 people at a Jewish celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach were a father and son, police said on Monday, as Australia began mourning victims of its worst gun violence in almost 30 years.

The father, a 50-year-old, was killed at the scene, taking the number of dead to 16, while his 24-year-old son was in a critical condition in hospital, police said at a press conference on Monday. The father and son were identified as Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, respectively, by state broadcaster ABC and other local media outlets, Reuters reported.

Officials have described Sunday’s shooting as a targeted antisemitic attack.

Forty people remain in hospital following the attack, including two police officers who are in a serious but stable condition, police said. The victims were aged between 10 and 87.

Witnesses said the attack at the famed beach, which was packed on a hot evening, lasted about 10 minutes, sending hundreds of people scattering along the sand and into nearby streets.

Police said around 1,000 people had attended the targeted Hanukkah event, which was held in a small park off the beach.

A bystander captured on video tackling and disarming an armed man during the attack has been hailed as a hero whose actions saved lives. 7News Australia named him as Ahmed al Ahmed, citing a relative, who said the 43-year-old fruit shop owner had been shot twice and had undergone surgery.

A fundraising page for the man had raised more than A$350,000 ($233,000) by Monday afternoon.

Police did not release the shooters’ names, but said the father had held a firearms license since 2015 and had six licensed weapons.

Home Minister Tony Burke said the father arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, while his son is an Australian-born citizen.

Police did not provide details about the firearms, but videos from the scene showed the men firing what appeared to be a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun.

“We are very much working through the background of both persons. At this stage, we know very little about them,” New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters.

Bondi local Morgan Gabriel, 27, said she had been heading to a nearby cinema when she heard what she thought were fireworks, before people started running up her street.

“I sheltered about six or seven. Two of them were actually my close friends, and the rest were just people that were on the street. But people, their phones had been left down the beach, and everyone was just trying to get away,” she said.

“It’s a very sad time this morning… Normally, like on a Monday or any morning, it’s packed. People are swimming, surfing, running. So this is very, very quiet. And there’s definitely a solemn sort of vibe.”

A makeshift memorial with flowers and Israeli and Australian flags was set up at the Bondi pavilion and an online condolence book was established. Police and private Jewish security guards wearing earpieces were positioned around as mourners paid respects and laid flowers.

WORLD LEADERS CONDEMN THE ATTACK

Authorities said they were confident only two attackers were involved in the incident, after previously saying they were checking whether a third offender was involved.

At the suspects’ home in Bonnyrigg, a suburb around 36 km (22 miles) west of the CBD, there was a heavy police presence on Monday, with a cordon wrapping around several neighbouring houses.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Bondi Beach on Monday morning to lay flowers near the scene of the attack.

“What we saw yesterday was an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores in an iconic Australian location,” Albanese told reporters.

“The Jewish community are hurting today. Today, all Australians wrap our arms around them and say, we stand with you. We will do whatever is necessary to stamp out antisemitism. It is a scourge, and we will eradicate it together.”

Albanese later urged Australians to light a candle in solidarity with the Jewish community “to show that light will indeed defeat darkness – part of what Hanukkah celebrates”, he said.

Albanese said several world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron had reached out and offered condolences and support.

Sunday’s shootings were the most serious in a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars in Australia since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had warned Albanese that Australia’s support for Palestinian statehood would fuel antisemitism.

In August, Australia accused Iran of directing at least two antisemitic attacks and gave Tehran’s ambassador a week to leave the country.

‘SAW BODIES ON THE GROUND’

Mass shootings are rare in Australia, one of the world’s safest countries. Sunday’s attack was the worst since 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern island state of Tasmania.

Rabbi Mendel Kastel, whose brother-in-law Eli Schlanger was killed in Sunday’s attack, said it had been a harrowing evening.

“You can very easily become very angry and try to blame people, turn on people but that’s not what this is about. It’s about a community,” he said.

“We need to step up at a time like this, be there for each other, and come together. And we will, and we will get through this, and we know that. The Australian community will help us do it,” he added.

Local woman Danielle, who declined to give her surname, was at the beach when the shooting occurred and raced to collect her daughter, who was attending a bar mitzvah at a function centre near where the alleged shooters were positioned.

“I heard there was a shooting so I bolted there to get my daughter, I could hear gunshots, I saw bodies on the ground. We are used to being scared, we have felt this way since October 7.”

Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies. The attack precipitated Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.

Australia’s Jewish diaspora is small but deeply embedded in the wider community, with about 150,000 people who identify as Jewish in the country of 27 million. About one-third of them are estimated to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi.

Major cities including Berlin, London and New York stepped up security around Hanukkah events on Sunday following the attack at Bondi.

Police in Rhode Island were searching for a suspect late on Saturday after a shooting at Brown University in Providence left two students dead and eight others critically wounded at the Ivy League school, officials said. A ninth person was hurt by bullet fragments, the mayor said.

Streets around campus remained blocked and packed with emergency vehicles hours after the shooting and law enforcement officials heightened security around the city as police continued their manhunt, Reuters reported.

“The individual responsible is still at large,” Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters at a 9:30 p.m. (0230 GMT) press conference. Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said the suspect had not been identified.

Officials said they are looking for a male dressed in black and were releasing a video of the suspect, who O’Hara said may have been wearing a mask. He said officials had retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but that police were not prepared to release details.

Officials said the gunman escaped after shooting students in Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building, where exams were taking place at the time.

“We are a week and a half away from Christmas. And two people died today and another eight are in the hospital,” Smiley said earlier in the evening. “So please pray for those families.”

Brown is on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island’s state capital. The university has hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dormitories.

“This is the day one hopes never happens, and it has,” Brown’s president Christina Paxson told reporters, confirming all or nearly all of the victims were students.

As news of the shooting spread, the school told students to shelter in place.

Brown student Chiang-Heng Chien told local TV station WJAR he was working in a lab with three other students when he saw the text about the active shooter situation a block away. They waited under desks for about two hours, he said.

Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee vowed that the shooter would be brought to justice. “We’re going to make sure that we catch the individual that brought so much suffering to so many people.”

The search for the suspect was hampered in part because downtown Providence was crowded with holiday shoppers and thousands of people attending concerts, local media said. Federal law enforcement and police from surrounding cities and towns were assisting in the search, officials said. According to local news reports, venues across the city were bringing in extra security.

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he had been briefed on the situation, which he called “terrible.”

“All we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those that were very badly hurt.”

Compared to many countries, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and places of worship are more common in the U.S., which has some of the most permissive gun laws in the developed world. The Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more victims have been shot, has counted 389 of them this year in the U.S., including at least six such shootings at schools.

Last year the U.S. had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado on Friday promised political change after slipping out of the country in secret to collect the Nobel Peace Prize, as the shock waves intensified from the Trump administration’s seizure of an oil tanker earlier this week.

That escalation came on the heels of a large-scale U.S. military buildup in the southern Caribbean as President Donald Trump campaigns to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, pushing relations to their most volatile point in years, Reuters reported.

The effects could ripple through the region, with Venezuelan oil exports falling sharply and crisis-stricken Cuba, already straining to power its grid, at risk of losing supply.

The U.S. seizure of the Skipper tanker off Venezuela’s coast on Wednesday marked the first U.S. capture of Venezuelan oil cargo since sanctions were imposed in 2019.

The vessel is now heading to Houston, where it will offload its cargo onto smaller ships, Reuters reported.

The Trump administration does not recognize Maduro, in power since 2013, as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

Washington has signalled more seizures are planned as part of efforts to choke off sanctioned oil flows, and subsequently imposed new sanctions on three nephews of Maduro’s wife and six tankers linked to them.

The U.S. military presence in the Caribbean has grown as Trump in recent weeks has discussed potential military intervention in Venezuela, based on accusations that the country ships narcotics to the United States. The Venezuelan government has denied the accusations.

So far there have been over 20 U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific against suspected drug vessels this year, in which nearly 90 people have been killed, alarming human rights advocates and stirring debate among U.S. lawmakers.

While many Republicans have backed the campaign, Democrats have questioned whether the campaign is illegal and urged more transparency, including the release of a full, unedited video, opens new tab of strikes on a suspected drug-trafficking boat.

MACHADO DEFIES BAN, URGES TRANSITION

Machado defied a decade-long travel ban and a period in hiding to travel to Oslo on Thursday, noting that she would soon bring the Nobel Peace Prize back home to Venezuela.

She said Maduro would leave power “whether there is a negotiated changeover or not,” vowed she is focused on a peaceful transition, and thanked Trump for his “decisive support.”

Machado is aligned with U.S. hardliners who accuse Maduro of ties to criminal networks – claims that U.S. intelligence has reportedly questioned.

When asked at a press conference in Oslo if she believed U.S. intervention was needed in Venezuela, Machado replied, “We are asking the world to help us.”

Venezuela condemned the tanker seizure as “blatant theft” and “international piracy,” saying it would file complaints with international bodies.

At the same time, Venezuelan lawmakers took a step to withdraw the country from the International Criminal Court, which is currently investigating alleged human rights abuses in the South American country.

Adding to the friction, the Venezuelan government announced the suspension of a U.S. migrant repatriation flight on Friday. A U.S. official countered that deportation flights would continue.