Terror attacks from Bondi to Boston show family ties behind deadly extremism

Close-knit familial connections can foster indoctrination, experts say, though father-son attacker pairs, such as the Hanukkah massacre shooters, are more rare than siblings

PARIS, France — Father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, who opened fire on a Jewish gathering at Australia’s Bondi Beach Sunday, killing 15, are far from being the only ones to carry out deadly terror while operating as a family.

Recent examples include brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon, and siblings Cherif and Said Kouachi, who were behind the January 2015 terror attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Another set of brothers, Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, were among the 10 jihadists who rampaged across the French capital in November that year, killing 130.

“It’s a longstanding and well-known phenomenon because terrorist indoctrination remains a social phenomenon, and the closest social environment is often the family,” Alexandre Rodde, a terrorism and mass casualty attack analyst, told AFP.

“Among the 19 terrorists who hijacked the planes on September 11, 2001, there were three sibling groups,” said Rodde, from the French National Gendarmerie and Coventry University in the UK.

Laurence Bindner, a specialist in online extremism, said on the whole there were more “horizontal radicalizations” between siblings than “vertical” ones of parents or children.

But she highlighted the example of Christine Riviere, a Muslim convert nicknamed “Granny Jihad,” who traveled to Syria three times in support of her jihadist son, Tyler Vilus.

Vilus fought alongside the Islamist State group in the early 2010s.

“This was an upward radicalization where the son progressively ‘contaminated’ the mother,” said Bindner, who co-founded the JOS Project, which analyzes the digital and media strategy of extremist groups.

“In the Bondi Beach case, we don’t yet know how it worked. It seems as if the son was involved in a network linked to IS,” she added.

‘Less readable’

Rodde said jihadist structures were now tending to reduce the size of cells to “very restricted groups of two or three individuals, even lone actors.”

One Western intelligence source said that made the threat “atomized” and “less organized,” allowing rapid radicalization.

“It’s harder to work on because the structures are less readable,” they added.

Western intelligence agencies have long kept a close eye on potential recruiting grounds for Islamist extremists, such as mosques, bookstores, and certain neighborhoods — or online.

But radicalization within a family makes the authorities’ job more difficult, said Mohammed Hafez, a specialist in Islamist movements, political militancy, and violent radicalization at the Naval Postgraduate University in Monterey, California.

“The conversations are private. They don’t need to get on Telegram, on WhatsApp, or other platforms that can be observed,” said Hafez, who wrote a 2016 paper, “The Ties That Bind: How Terrorists Exploit Family Bonds.”

Families, friends, or work could help stop an individual from being radicalized over a platform such as Telegram, but if it happens in the home, “you are trapped,” he added.

“You are with that loving brother, or you’re with that father, or with that husband or wife. There is no walking away from that. There are no countervailing voices because you’re trapped in that relationship,” Hafez said.  “I suspect a lot of people will go along with a brother or a father or a husband or a wife, not because they buy the ideology or they believe in the cause but because they value the relationship.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.