Five of the six victims were women, as were most of the injured.
Sydney:
Australian police said on Monday they were investigating why a 40-year-old mentally ill man appeared to target women as he strolled through a Sydney shopping mall armed with a machete, killing six people and injuring a dozen others.
Footage shared on social media shows unshaven homeless man Joel Cauchi rampaging through the vast, crowded Westfield shopping center in Bondi Junction on Saturday afternoon, pursued by The victims are mostly women.
Five of the six victims were women, as were most of the injured.
“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they? It’s certainly an inquiry for us,” NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said.
“It was obvious to me, and it was obvious to detectives, that this seemed to be an area of interest – offenders primarily targeting women and avoiding men,” she told national broadcaster ABC.
Weber stressed that police had no way of knowing what the attacker was thinking.
“That’s why it’s important that detectives spend so much time interviewing people who knew him.”
Couch’s Facebook profile shows he is from Toowoomba, near Brisbane, and attended a local high school and college.
He has a distinctive gray, red and yellow dragon tattoo on his right arm to help identify him.
“Very painful”
The last of Couch’s six victims was identified Monday as young Chinese student Zheng Yixuan.
Other women killed include a designer, a surf lifesaving volunteer, the daughter of an entrepreneur and a new mother whose nine-month-old baby was hospitalized with injuries.
Ashlee Good, a 38-year-old mother, desperately handed her injured baby girl to a stranger before being taken to hospital where she died from her injuries.
Police said the baby, named Harriet, was in a stable condition in a Sydney hospital.
Goode’s family described her as “a beautiful mother, daughter, sister, partner, friend, all-around remarkable person and so much more.”
“Words cannot express how grateful we are to the two men who held and cared for our children when Ashley was unable to do so,” they said in a statement to Australian media.
The only victim was Faraz Tahir, a 30-year-old Pakistani man who was working as a security guard when he was stabbed.
Couch’s assault lasted about half an hour and ended when Officer Amy Scott shot him.
The state police chief said that after the shooting, Scott, who was hailed as a hero, was dealing with the “very traumatic incident” with his family.
Couch’s parents expressed their thoughts about the victim in a statement and said their son’s actions were “truly horrific.”
“We are still trying to understand what happened. He has struggled with mental health issues since he was a teenager.”
“Do her job well”
The parents also sent a message to the officer who shot their son.
They said: “She was just doing her job to protect others and we hope she copes well.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had spoken with some of the families of the victims.
“The gender classification is certainly concerning – every victim here is mourned,” he told ABC radio, promising a “comprehensive” police investigation.
Couch is believed to have traveled to Sydney about a month ago and rented a small storage unit in the city, police said. Inside were personal items, including a surfboard.
His parents said he had been living in his car and in hotels, with only sporadic contact with his family via text messages.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
