Albanese Vows to Toughen Gun Laws After Deadly Bondi Shooting

The police said on Monday that they expected to bring criminal charges against the surviving suspect, who is in a coma after being shot by the police.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed on Monday to toughen Australia’s already strict gun laws, after the country’s worst mass shooting in three decades killed 15 people and wounded dozens more at a Jewish holiday celebration in Sydney.

“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary,” he said at a news conference.

Officials have said that the attack on Sunday at Bondi Beach was an act of terrorism carried out by a 24-year-old Australian citizen and his father, an immigrant living in the country legally. The elder man, 50, who came to the country in 1998, had six firearms registered in his name. His country of origin was not immediately clear.

Police officers responding to the massacre shot both suspects, killing the father and wounding the son, officials said. They have not publicly identified either man. The police said on Monday that they expected to bring criminal charges against the younger man.

Australia had what advocates considered the “gold standard” on gun control. The country essentially banned assault rifles and many other semiautomatic weapons, as well as shotguns, after a gunman killed 35 people in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur in 1996. After the attack at Bondi Beach, the country’s leaders said they were prepared to enact additional restrictions.

Potential measures could include a limit on the number of firearms a person can own and a ban on gun licenses for noncitizens of Australia. Mr. Albanese said the government should also periodically review gun licenses to ensure that those holding them had not been “radicalized.”

Mr. Albanese said the younger suspect first came to the attention of the police in 2019 because of his connections to two other people, whom the prime minister did not identify. The police also interviewed his father at the time, officials said. But Australia’s intelligence service had determined there was no evidence that the men had been radicalized, Mr. Albanese said.

The shooting suspects did not have any history of criminal offenses, the police said, and Mr. Albanese said there was no indication that the men had been part of a wider terrorist group.

“There’s no evidence of collusion, no evidence that these people were part of a cell,” Mr. Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that the younger man was in a coma after being shot by the police.

After the elder man moved to Australia, he obtained a partner visa in 2001, and he had been living in the country on a resident visa, officials said.

The shooting prompted an outpouring of grief for the victims who had been celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at a festival with music, food and face-painting. The dead included a retired police officer who loved rugby, a Holocaust survivor who was at the festival with his children and grandchildren, and a 10-year-old girl named Matilda.

“She was happy, always smiling, laughing,” the girl’s aunt, Lina Chernykh, said in an interview on Monday. She asked that only the girl’s first name be used to protect the family’s privacy. She added that Matilda’s younger sister, Summer, had witnessed the shooting and was traumatized.

“I just hope no other family has to go through this pain,” Ms. Chernykh said.

Some members of Australia’s Jewish community said the shooting was horrifying but not entirely surprising. Antisemitism, they said, had been intensifying in Australia since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating Israeli military campaign in Gaza that followed.

Last year, a kosher restaurant in Sydney was the target of an arson attack, and masked men set fire to a synagogue in a suburb of Melbourne. Australian officials blamed Iran for the attacks and expelled the country’s diplomats. Iran denied involvement. This year, a synagogue in Sydney was defaced with red swastikas, and a day care center was torched and scrawled with antisemitic slurs.

After the attack at Bondi Beach, some Australian Jews said the government had not done enough to respond to antisemitism.

“We feel very let down by the Australian government,” said Ahron Eisman, 37, who added that his neighbor was among those killed on Sunday. “We’ve been saying it’s only a matter of time.”

Bondi Beach has been an anchor of Sydney’s Jewish community since the first refugees arrived there after World War II, said Yvonne Haber, 62, who has lived in the area for three decades. “This is our worst nightmare,” she said.

Jillian Segal, who was appointed by Mr. Albanese as Australia’s special envoy to fight antisemitism in response to the recent attacks, said in a statement that the shooting on Sunday was the culmination of a “clear pattern.”

“What once seemed distant or uncomfortable can no longer be ignored,” she said. Ms. Segal urged Australia to act on a series of recommendations that she presented to the government in July.

Some of her recommendations focused on countering the spread of antisemitic views, especially on social media; monitoring content published by the news media; and allowing the government to withhold funding from universities that “facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.”

At the time, Mr. Albanese said that the government would “carefully consider” the recommendations, but did not commit to carrying all of them out. Some people have pushed back on Ms. Segal’s ideas. The Australia Human Rights Institute accused her of “biased arguments, weak evidence and recommendation overreach.”

As the investigation into the attack on Sunday continued, the country rallied around a bystander who had been recorded on video tackling and disarming one of the gunmen as he fired at the Hanukkah festival. Australian officials identified the man as Ahmed el Ahmed, a Syrian-born fruit vendor, who was wounded in the attack.

“He wasn’t thinking about the background of the people he’s saving, the people dying in the street,” Mr. el Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Fateh el Ahmed, told the national broadcaster ABC. “He doesn’t discriminate between one nationality and another.”

Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, who visited Mr. el Ahmed in the hospital, posted a photo on social media on Monday of the vendor sitting upright with bandages on his arm.

Mr. Albanese said Mr. el Ahmed had confronted one gunman but had been shot by the other, according to ABC. Mr. el Ahmed’s parents told ABC on Monday that he had been shot four to five times in his shoulder and was awaiting further surgery for his wounds.

“Ahmed is a real-life hero,” Mr. Minns wrote on social media, adding that the man’s “incredible bravery no doubt saved countless lives when he disarmed a terrorist at enormous personal risk.”

Reporting was contributed by Amelia Nierenberg, Jin Yu Young, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Ephrat Livni and Isabella Kwai.

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