Australian Intelligence Watched ISIS Cell Operate for Six Years and Did Nothing to Prevent Massacre

The 15 dead at Bondi Beach weren’t killed by unknown actors. They were killed by the son of a man who accumulated six firearms while his child maintained documented associations with convicted ISIS terrorist. These were associations Australian security services knew about since 2019.

Naveed Akram wasn’t a mystery actor.

ASIO investigated him for six months in 2019 after his close associate Isaac El Matari declared himself ISIS’s “Australian commander” and got seven years for plotting attacks. Naveed was “closely connected” to multiple members of that cell. The investigation of the ongoing threat was closed with a determination of “no ongoing threat.”

Then nothing.

His other associate, Youssef Uweinat, served as a youth leader at Wissam Haddad’s prayer centre while recruiting Australian minors for ISIS attacks. Got four years. Released. In August 2024, sixteen months ago, Uweinat was photographed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving a black jihadist flag at a protest.

Still nothing.

Naveed’s father Sajid applied for a firearms licence in 2020, received it in 2023, and legally purchased six weapons over the next two years. No mechanism in Australian law connected the son’s known extremist associations to the father’s firearms application.

The databases of father weapons supply and son extremism don’t talk to each other.

In November 2025, father and son flew to Manila, together, and declared Davao as their destination. Together they went to the gateway city to Mindanao, which ASIO’s own website identifies as a “target destination for foreign terrorist fighters“. They spent nearly a month in the region known for ISIS training camps that have operated since 1994.

No alert.

No enhanced scrutiny upon return.

Nothing.

Three weeks later, as a result of this militant training to kill Jews, they opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration with all six legally purchased weapons. ISIS flags were in the car, as could have been predicted. Their IEDs failed to detonate.

The question isn’t how ISIS radicalized two men in Sydney.

The question is how an overt extremist network of convicted members with public protests, a known prayer centre, and documented youth recruitment operations ran for six years under active observation without triggering a single intervention.

Denying one firearms license would have prevented a father from legally stockpiling the weapons they would use to massacre Jews. Firing 4 rounds in 5 seconds from a bolt-action rifle is terrorism training that Australia enabled.

The cell wasn’t hidden.

The travel wasn’t hidden.

The flags weren’t hidden.

The firearms purchases weren’t hidden.

The Australian state failure was.