5 people and a suspect killed in a Sydney shopping center stabbing attack, police say : NPR

SYDNEY — A person started stabbing individuals at a busy Sydney procuring middle Saturday earlier than he was fatally shot, leaving a number of individuals together with a small baby injured, police mentioned.

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

Cooke mentioned he believed that the suspect acted alone, and he was “content material that there isn’t any persevering with risk.” 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 procuring middle, and other people streaming out.

Paramedics have been treating sufferers on the scene.

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

“And out of the blue we heard a shot or perhaps two photographs 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 way of the again and now we’re out.”