The men accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia on Sunday stayed at a budget hotel in the southern Philippines for much of the month before the massacre, rarely leaving a room that they extended week by week and paid for in cash, according to the hotel.
The two suspects, Naveed Akram, 24, and his father, Sajid Akram, 50, checked into the GV Hotel in Davao City on Nov. 1 and checked out on Nov. 28, hotel staff told The New York Times on Thursday. They then flew to Sydney via Manila, Philippine officials have said. During their stay, the men barely talked to hotel workers, largely ate fast food and did not have visitors at their room, staff said.
“They would stay one week and pay in cash. Then they would come to the counter and ask to extend for a week,” said Angelica Ytang, 20, a receptionist at the hotel. “The longest they would be outside their room was one hour.”
Davao is the largest city on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, which is home to a smattering of long-simmering Islamist insurgencies, some involving groups that claim loyalty to the Islamic State.
The suspects’ stay in Davao has become a point of focus for investigators digging into the attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney, which killed 15 people and was declared by Australian officials to be an act of terrorism inspired by “Islamic State ideology.”
During their weeks at the GV Hotel, the father and son stayed in Room 315, a spartan accommodation with two single beds that costs around $16 a night. Ms. Ytang said the reservation was made under Naveed Akram’s name only.
“They were not approachable,” she said, adding: “I thought they were just sleeping in there.”
It is not clear what the men spent their time doing, Ms. Ytang said, though she said they did not seem suspicious to the staff at the time. She described their interactions with the staff as infrequent and basically mundane. On occasions, she recalled, they asked to buy a carton of water and inquired about where in Davao they could buy durian.
The suspects’ stay in the southern Philippines, with its history of Islamist militant groups that have sometimes run training camps there, has led to speculation that the men may have gone there to learn how to carry out an attack. But the National Security Council in the Philippines said in a statement on Wednesday that the country had found “no validated report or confirmation that the individuals involved in the Bondi Beach incident received any form of training in the Philippines.”
And a presidential press official said Wednesday that it “strongly rejects” claims that the Philippines is a training center for the Islamic State, saying that militant groups in the country “now operate in a fragmented and diminished capacity.”
In 2017, Islamic State fighters took over the city of Marawi in Mindanao for five months, prompting the Philippine government to unleash an all-out war, killing key leaders and forcing militants to surrender. Researchers have documented recruitment efforts linked to the Islamic State in the years before the siege.
In Sydney, the police found two homemade Islamic State flags in the car that the suspects drove to the site of the attack on Sunday, and also recovered improvised explosive devices from the vehicle. The police said officers shot both men; the father died, and the son is hospitalized and has been charged in the attacks.
Pranav Baskar is an international reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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