At least 6 dead, suspect killed after stabbing attack at shopping center in Sydney, Australia; multiple people injured

SYDNEY (AP) — A person stabbed 5 individuals to demise at a busy Sydney buying heart Saturday earlier than he was fatally shot, police mentioned. A number of individuals, together with a small little one, have been additionally injured within the assault.

The suspect stabbed 9 individuals on the Westfield Procuring Centre in Bondi Junction, which is within the metropolis’s jap suburbs, earlier than a police inspector shot him after he turned and raised a knife, New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke instructed reporters. 5 of the victims and the suspect died, he mentioned. He had no particular particulars on the situation of the injured.

Cooke mentioned he believed that the suspect acted alone, and he was “content material that there is no such thing as a persevering with menace.” He mentioned officers did not know who the offender was. “That is fairly uncooked,” he mentioned, and a “prolonged and exact” investigation was simply starting.

He mentioned there was “nothing that we’re conscious of on the scene that will point out any motive or any ideology.” When requested whether or not officers have been ruling out terrorism, he mentioned: “We’re not ruling something out.”

Cooke mentioned the police inspector, a senior officer, was alone when she confronted the suspect and engaged him quickly after her arrival on the scene, “saving a variety of individuals’s lives.”

Video confirmed many ambulances and police vehicles across the buying heart, and other people streaming out.

Paramedics have been treating sufferers on the scene.

Witness Roi Huberman, a sound engineer at ABC TV in Australia, instructed the community that he sheltered in a retailer in the course of the incident.

“And immediately we heard a shot or possibly two pictures and we did not know what to do,” he mentioned. “Then the very succesful particular person within the retailer took us to the again the place it may be locked. She then locked the shop after which she then allow us to by means of the again and now we’re out.”