Bondi Junction stabbing, shooting live updates: Multiple dead in Sydney’s eastern suburbs as police probe terror links

Watch live coverage of the situation outside Bondi Junction Westfield, where multiple people have been killed in a stabbing and shooting spree.

Video has emerged of a man wearing shorts and a sports jersey jogging inside the shopping centre, carrying a knife.

An eyewitness who had been near a gym at the shopping centre saw the man, and told nine he looked “scattered and chaotic”.

“He wasn’t going for anyone personally, you could tell it looked quite random, he was just running around with his knife,” the man told Nine News.

“We had also seen people with bollards I think who were going to chase him, so it sometimes wasn’t clear who was a bad person.

“Then we saw the guy with a knife and we thought are they trying to stop him, are they part of that crew, is it more than one person but it’s not clear in that moment.”

This masthead has spoken to an eyewitness who said he saw a dead body lying at the entrance to the Chanel store on level four.

The man, who identified himself as Bill and works at a store on level five of the shopping centre, said he saw people running and then went to look over the railing down to level four.

“As soon as I looked over I could see all of it right in front of me. You could see the blood trail. I looked into Chanel and there was a dead body on the floor,” Bill said.

“There was another lady with her legs up, so she was still alive, it looked like security or passers-by were trying to help her.“

The blood trail was 10 to 20 metres in length, Bill said.

He said he did not see the offender, but one of his mates did and reported seeing a “big knife” about 30 centimetres in length.

When he heard gunshots, Bill said he ran back into the store, and a group of about six people – staff and customers – locked themselves in the back room.

“Everyone was crying … it’s very scary to be honest,” he said.

There are reports of up to six people dead in the stabbing and shooting in the Bondi Junction shopping centre.

Officers from commands all over Sydney are likely to be deployed to the shopping centre in the coming hours, with an enormous crime scene likely to take up to two day to process.

Two men have just spoken to Nine News about helping a baby and its mother who were both bleeding.

The pair, who indicated they were brothers, said they saw a man “run up to the woman with the baby”.

“We got them into the store … rang for help,” one of the men said.

The men said the baby’s mother had been stabbed, and they were trying to compress the baby’s wounds, including using shirts from the shop.

Ellie Williams, 21, was finishing lunch on the top floor of Westfield Bondi food court with her friend about 3.40 pm when she saw groups of people running and screaming.

“People were so confused and we were told a guy was stabbing people on the floors below”, she said.

People were being locked into stores and we looked down and saw a guy with a knife wearing a hoodie chasing people, she said.

“I heard a man scream as we were about to go down the escalator,” Ellie said, and as she left through the fire escape she heard three gunshots.

There were no police in the building and no alarms were going off when this happened she said.

An eyewitness said shoppers were panicking and running as he went to enter Bondi Junction this afternoon.

“People were absolutely petrified, and just so many young kids,” a man named Andrew told Nine News.

He had just arrived with his daughter and was going down an escalator when chaos broke out.

“It was just general pandemonium trying to get out of there,” he said. “A lady, she had fallen over on the escalator.”

One woman, named Aviva, told 2GB Radio she left Coles to try to get to her car and “came across dead bodies on the ground”.

“I saw two,” she said.

“It’s awful, it’s just terrible, I’m in shock.”

Shoppers have started to be released from lockdown inside Westfield, with police lifting up tape to allow them out of the cordoned area.

Helen Hewett was in the Apple store when staff shut the doors and ushered everyone to the back of the store.

“We had no idea what was going on, but we heard there was a shooting outside Coles,” she said.

The store was in lockdown from just after 5pm for about 45 minutes.

Hannah Bodrozic and Guy Johnston were shopping in Country Road when they saw a group of around 20 young people fleeing down the escalators.

They didn’t understand what was happening until someone screamed: “There’s a man stabbing people!”

From there chaos erupted.“We didn’t really know where to go. We tried to go back in the other building but there were people running down that direction,” Bodrozic said.

The couple froze as shops around them slammed their shutters shut, with groups of people running in every direction.

“Then we heard three gunshots and everyone just started screaming,” she said.

Around 100 people stampeded out the exit, she said.

“You’d never expect something like this in Sydney,” Johnston said.

Police responded to reports of multiple people stabbed at Bondi Westfield just before 4pm. Heavily armed tactical operations police responded and shot a male offender.

Four victims have been located by officers so far.

There are unconfirmed reports of a second male offender at the scene. Police are still trying to gather information about motivation – terrorism links are being considered.