After the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia in which two gunmen killed 15 people, targeting members of the Jewish community, some media outlets claimed one of the two shooters was from Pakistan. The shooter was, in actuality, from India. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar swiftly condemned the terror attack and stood up for Pakistan and Pakistani-Australians, condemning the attack.
One of the alleged shooters, Naveed Akram, was born in Australia. His father, Sajid Akram, the second alleged gunman who was killed by police, was an Indian citizen.
“When the incident happened, certain media outlets were very quick to state that one of the attackers was from Pakistan and the other one was born in Australia,” Minister Tarar said during a press briefing in Islamabad.
“There was no evidence to prove this claim, there was no documentation, and there was no verification of this claim,” Minister Tarar added.
In this press briefing, Minister Tarar also referenced the Army Public School massacre from 2014, in which 147 people—including 132 students—were killed.
“We are a country whose children have also given sacrifices, whose children have laid down their lives in this war against terrorism,” Tarar stated, making clear that Pakistan sadly also knows firsthand the pain that comes from facing terrorist attacks.
“We can feel the pain of Australia, the citizens of Australia. We can relate to them because we see this happening in Pakistan,” Minister Tarar said. He also praised the Australian citizen that seized a gun from one of the attackers, saying that this man had, “saved several lives.”
Australian news outlets have made note of misinformation circulating regarding the attacks. SBS News reported in an article published on December 20 that it had “seen multiple X posts, still online at the time of publishing, that falsely identify one of the alleged attackers as a Pakistani. The posts now have hundreds of reshares and hundreds of thousands of impressions or views.”
The SBS News article went on to state that “several YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views — which contain the same false claims — also remain online.”
This online misinformation has real-world consequences. A business owner named Akram, who has been in Australia since 2018, said, according to SBS, that his images had been incorrectly associated with one of the gunmen on social media and that police did little to assist him.
