“Nothing to See Here”: How Australia’s Terror Watchdogs Missed Bondi – Or Were Told to Look Away

“Nothing to see here.” Not in her own words, but it’s what AFP Commissioner, Krissy Barrett, signals as she blinks in late December sun, at a presser in which she claims that, The “Bondi Killers”, Sajid Akram (50) and his son, Naveed Akram (24) who carried out a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025, killing 15 people, acted alone, directly contradicting reports at the time that the pair had travelled to the Philippines for training. Barrett can’t say much more, she adds, about this “heinous hate-filled” crime, given that the surviving “individual” is “before the courts.”

But the Commissioner does gush thanks to the Philippines National Police, aka PNP, a force which does little for its reputation, as Human Rights Watch attests, by continuing its drug war extra-judicial killings, even if the concept wildly excites Donald Trump to copy off the Venezuelan coast, where the total number of known boat strikes is reported to be 30. 107 fishermen have been incinerated since early September, according to a recent public tally from the drug-war hucksters of Trump’s mal-administration.

AUKUS and QUAD, mean that we are, of course, ever more deeply tied to the USA, yet Australia’s silence on Trump’s dirty war in Venezuela, is part of our long tradition of letting America get away with murder (and the odd contra deal) under Reagan in Latin America. Just as, Australia has historically deferred to Indonesia on Papua (West Papua) policy, prioritising what is referred to as “bilateral stability” over criticism of Jakarta’s repressive measures, including military crackdowns and human rights abuses.

We remain silent while Indonesian forces also carry out extrajudicial killings, and are accused of torture, enforced disappearances, and mass displacement of indigenous Papuans. UN experts cite child killings and over 100,000 displaced since 2018, amid obstructed humanitarian aid. Human Rights Watch notes ongoing repression, including racism, environmental destruction from transmigration, and impunity for state violence that marginalises Papuans in their own lands. But not a peep from Canberra.

This isn’t oversight; it’s alliance calculus, where human rights scrutiny evaporates for partners who share intelligence, secure borders, or sign the right treaties. Share the same shadowy bosses.

But Australia’s most deafening silence? Gaza. While we wring our hands over fifteen dead on Bondi Beach – and rightly so – we’ve said virtually nothing about over 70,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023, the majority women and children. No condemnation of hospitals bombed, aid workers targeted, starvation deployed as weapon. Just Penny Wong’s carefully parsed “concerns about humanitarian law” while we continue intelligence sharing with Israel and abstain from UN votes calling for ceasefires.

When Jewish Australians are slaughtered at a Hanukkah celebration, it’s a national tragedy demanding answers. When Palestinian children are crushed under rubble in Gaza, it’s a “complex situation” requiring “both sides” equivocation. The Albanese government recognises Palestinian statehood with one hand while enabling its erasure with the other. This selective outrage isn’t subtle. It’s alliance management. Israel is a strategic partner; Palestinians are expendable. So we mourn our dead while subsidising theirs, and pretend not to see the connection between our foreign policy silences and the violence they licence.

The Bondi killers didn’t materialize from nowhere. They emerged from a world where Muslim lives are demonstrably cheaper than Western ones, where decade after decade of massacres go unanswered, and where Australia’s complicity is written in abstentions and intelligence-sharing agreements.

So we are embedded with Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, another scion of the Marcos dynasty, fabled for its opulence, whose father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr, is said to have nicked $10 billion during his dictatorship, 1965-1986. Bongbong’s efforts to clean up the family act are not helped when sister, Senator Imee Marcos, publicly burns her brother for his chronic drug habit.

Data from 2024 and 2025 indicates internal “cleansing” efforts are active, but systemic issues, ranging from petty extortion to high-level drug “recycling”, persist. Of course, we must not mention the war.

While the AFP lauds Philippine police for exonerating the Bondi killers as lone wolves, at this stage, despite a reputation for planted evidence, fraud and executions; Australia stays mute on America’s lethal Venezuela campaign and Indonesia’s Papuan bloodletting. If allies’ dirty hands don’t taint Bondi footage, why trust the ‘nothing to see’ line from forces long accused of cover-ups?

The subtext is that the PNP are squeaky-clean, dinky-di, pure as the driven snow, and like our own embarrassed ASIO, AFP, the JCTT, “The Joint Counter Terrorism Team; that alphabet soup of AFP, ASIO, state police, and border force and the almost new AFP Commissioner’s media unit would never lie just to cover their arses.

Just because the Bondi business happened on their watch, doesn’t mean that they are responsible.

Just to bookend the message, our Prime Minister is all over their president like a rash. Another Marcos dynasty Muppet, (Ferdinand, Jr), what’s not to love? In a rare AFP-PM, duet, a touching public display of affection, there’s a type of bush poetry slam. It’s not often you hear a good word said about the Philippine National Police but, can we believe our ears, the PM and the AFP are competing to praise the great man. Even if his sister says Ferd’s over-fond of the Bolivian marching powder, nose candy, a cocaine abuser.

”His vice is the reason for rampant corruption, lack of direction, wrong decisions, absence of accountability and lack of justice in his government.”

Luckily, just up the road, 6,270 kilometres or so separate our Manila “neighbour” from Canberra. And distance definitely enhances the view. First up is the embarrassingly fulsome Albo:

“We have been working with the Philippine National Police to counter terrorism in our region for decades, and their assistance during the past fortnight has been absolutely crucial.”

Read the room, Prime Minister. Nobody is going to buy your flannel. But wait. Yes. Look. It’s Krissy:

“The initial assessment from the Philippine National Police is that the individuals rarely left their hotel, and there is no evidence to suggest they received training or underwent logistical preparation for their alleged attack.”

“Of course, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” As Mandy Rice Davies almost said and she knew a thing or two about spies. Transparency International ranks the Philippines 33/100 and no-one can imagine the pressure that the poor bastards of the Davao branch of the PNP must be under now that it’s all over the news. They let a couple of terrorists stay for 28 days in the one star, twenty-five dollars-a-night- cash-only-because-it-can’t-be-traced; 97-room GV hotel in Davao which is conveniently located in the heart of the city and not far from the local police HQ.

Security experts would call it a “low signature environment.”

Media are quick to call it “a lone wolf attack” a phrase which limps a bit given there were two gun-men, and we already know that they spent 28 days in Davao a part of the Philippines associated with ISIS activity and the scene of a market bombing. But they only went out to eat. One hour a day?

Twenty-eight days. That’s what keeps nagging. Twenty-eight days in a cash-only fleapit where the air-con wheezes like a dying smoker and the plumbing gurgles like a bucket bong. The GV Hotel isn’t where you go for a holiday. It’s where you go to wait. To be invisible. To become a ghost until the money arrives, a message is delivered or the final instruction comes through. Or the trifecta.

What do two men do for twenty-eight days in a one-star Davao hotel room? They’re not seeing the sights. They’re not island-hopping. Furthermore, they rarely leave the hotel, according to the PNP’s “initial assessment”; a phrase doing more heavy lifting than a Filipino drug mule.

They’re waiting for something. Or someone. Or an electronic signal.

The hotel itself tells the story that Barrett and Albo won’t. “Cash only” means no paper trail. No credit card records. No names in banking systems. It’s the first principle of operational security, taught in any militant training camp from Mindanao to Syria. Or Tel Aviv. The 97-room GV might as well have “deniable venue” stamped on its crumbling facade. And it ought to have rung alarm bells on ASIO and AFP.

Or perhaps the algorithms needs a bit of a tweak. What part of “owns six guns; travels to ISIS training centre in the Philippines with son already tagged for his online associations is OK to surveillance? Unless, of course, it’s all an elaborate ruse. ASIO and AFP knew all about it. Some bigger boys warned them off.

And Davao. Why Davao? Because it’s not Manila, not some tourist trap where foreign faces get second glances. Davao’s where Abu Sayyaf splinter cells fade into the urban sprawl, where the local ISIS franchise recruits, where a 2016 night market bombing killed fifteen; the same number as Bondi. Locals remark on it. The city’s southeastern corner is porous as a sieve, with boat traffic to Mindanao’s ungoverned spaces where Philippine military raids still flush out training camps. But why make work for yourself?

But sure, “lone wolves.” Two of them. Who travelled internationally together. Stayed together for four weeks. Coordinated their attack with military precision. That’s not lone wolf behaviour; that’s hired gun protocol. You wait because strict schedules can be lethal. You wait until the money clears. You wait for final target confirmation. You wait because the people paying you need time to ensure everything’s in place: the weapons cache, the transport, the safe houses, the exfiltration plan that failed.

Not to mention the paid or promised paradise awaiting the jihadist.

Let’s be clear. The “lone wolf” label, in this context, is intelligence community Newspeak for “we don’t want to chase this thread.” Because that thread leads to uncomfortable questions about who funded the trip, who coordinated logistics, who selected Bondi’s Hanukkah celebration as a target. Found the carpark. It leads to the same questions the AFP isn’t asking about synagogue attacks in Sydney; questions that might reveal networks, conspiracies, paid state-level actors or their proxies.

Occam’s razor slices through the official narrative. The simplest explanation isn’t that two men spontaneously decided to massacre fifteen people after a month-long Davao holiday. It’s that they were contracted, trained or directed, paid or promised paradise, and sent to Australia with a specific mission.

ASIO’s entire raison d’être is spotting exactly this pattern: foreign travel to high-risk regions, extended stays in terrorism-linked cities, cash-only transactions, coordinated attacks. That’s Terrorism 101. The Joint Counter Terrorism Team – that alphabet soup of AFP, ASIO, state police, and border force – supposedly exists to connect these dots before innocent people die on beaches.

And they’ve got the powers. They call them the “God” powers. The 2021 Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (High Risk Terrorist Offenders) Act handed ASIO and the AFP surveillance tools that would make the Stasi blush. Extended control orders. Preventative detention. Warrantless searches. The ability to detain someone who hasn’t committed a crime but might be thinking about it.

Two Australian citizens travel to Davao; a city synonymous with ISIS activity, hole up in a cash-only hotel for four weeks, then return home and execute a meticulously planned mass shooting. That’s not a failure of surveillance capability. Australia’s metadata retention laws mean every phone ping, every email, every social media interaction leaves a trail. Our border systems flag travel to high-risk destinations. ASIO has legislative authority to monitor, intercept, and detain.

So either our intelligence apparatus is catastrophically incompetent, unable to spot a textbook terrorism profile despite billions in funding and sweeping powers, or they saw it and were told to stand down.

The second option is more disturbing, but also more plausible. Intelligence work is political work. Priorities get set above the pay grade of field officers. Resources get diverted.

Investigations get shelved because they complicate diplomatic relationships or expose inconvenient truths about allied nations’ failure to police their own territory.

Maybe flagging the Akrams’ Davao sojourn would’ve meant admitting the Philippines is a terrorism training ground, which would’ve undermined Albo’s cosy relationship with the Marcos kleptocracy. Maybe it would’ve revealed how porous our border security actually is despite the tough-on-terror rhetoric. Maybe it would’ve exposed that synagogues in Sydney and beach celebrations in Bondi are targets in a coordinated campaign that our intelligence community either can’t penetrate or won’t acknowledge.

So instead we get the “lone wolf” fairy tale. Two spontaneous actors, no connections, nothing to see. The same script rolled out after each synagogue attack, even as the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

But they didn’t just miss this. With 2021’s legal arsenal, you’d have to work at missing it. You’d have to deliberately look away. Blind Freddy in welding goggles could see it. You’d have to be told to back off.

And rather than accountability, we get Barrett’s sun-drenched presser serving us “before the courts” stonewalling and Albo’s embarrassing kowtowing to Manila’s corrupt PNP, a force that plants evidence as policy and executes suspects as sport. A narco-state which takes a lot of time and police energy to run.

The real question isn’t what happened in that Davao hotel room for twenty-eight days. The real question is what happened in Canberra while two men marinated in a terrorist hotspot before coming home to kill fifteen Australians. Who knew? When did they know? And who told them it wasn’t worth pursuing?

But there’s nothing to see here. Commissioner’s orders.

Coda:

Official Gaza Health Ministry figures:

• 70,668 Palestinians killed in Gaza (as of December 17, 2025)
• 171,152 injured
• Plus 1,043 killed in the West Bank (including 229 children)
• Total: approximately 71,700+ Palestinians killed

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES

Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN

Dear Reader,

Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.

Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.

Join our community of truth-seekers. Donate via PayPal or credit card via the button below, or bank transfer [BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969] and help us keep shining a light.

With gratitude, The AIMN Team