• Australian team probes if Sajid, Naveed met extremists in Mindanao.
• Davao hotel staff said men stayed mostly in their room for 28 days.
• CCTVs being reviewed to trace other places they visited or people met.

MANILA: One of the two alleged Bondi Beach shooters visited a gun store during their stay in the Philippines, police said on Saturday as they attempted to retrace the pair’s movements.

An Australian counter-terrorism team is investigating whether Sajid Akram and his son Naveed met with extremists during a nearly month-long visit to the southern island of Mindanao before the mass shooting that killed 15 people in Sydney six days ago.

The staff of Davao City’s GV Hotel told AFP this week that the two men had stayed holed up in their small room for most of their 28-day stay, leaving only briefly each morning.

“What we’ve seen is one of them visiting a gun shop,” Davao regional police spokeswoman Catherine Dela Rey said on Saturday, adding later that it was 50-year-old Sajid Akram who had been seen.

“Our reviewing of CCTVs is ongoing, so we can see the other places they visited and the people they could have spoken with,” she said.

While little has been made public at this stage of the investigation, National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano told reporters on Friday there was “no way” the men could have left the city to conduct training.

“They would go out and come back after two or three hours, the longest was eight hours, but still … that time window (would) not suffice for them to get out of Davao,” he said.

Police inquiries had also revealed that neither of the men had visited any of the city´s seven gun ranges, he said.

President Ferdinand Marcos has criticised media reports that he said misleadingly portrayed the Philippines “as a training hotspot for terrorism”.

“For years, we have acted decisively to dismantle terrorist networks, to secure communities, and to sustain our hard-earned peace,” he said in a speech celebrating the 90th anniversary of the country´s armed forces on Friday.

“To dismiss these gains with unfounded speculation is not acceptable.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Washington is grateful to Pakistan for its openness to considering a role in the proposed International Stabilisation Force for Gaza.

This comes despite Islamabad not yet confirming any commitment to the deployment of troops, The News reported on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Washington on Friday,  Rubio responded to a question on whether the US had received Pakistan’s consent to send troops to Gaza for peacebuilding and peacemaking and said: “We are very grateful to Pakistan for their offer to be a part of [the peacekeeping force] or at least their offer to consider being a part of it.”

Rubio added, “I think we owe them a few more answers before we can ask anybody to firmly commit. But I feel very confident that we have a number of nation-states acceptable to all sides in this who are willing to step forward and be a part of that stabilisation force and…Pakistan is key if they agree.”

“We owe them a few more answers before we get there.”

Rubio said that “the next step” was announcing “the border of peace…the Palestinian technocratic group,” which he said would allow stakeholders to “firm up the stabilisation force, including how it’s going to be paid for, what their rules of engagement are, what their role will be in demilitarisation.”

However, Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday that no decision had yet been taken on participation in the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza.

“We have not taken a decision to participate in the ISF as yet,” Foreign Office spokesperson Tahir Hussain Andrabi said at the FO’s weekly media briefing.

Responding to a query, the spokesperson said discussions on the ISF were ongoing in “certain capitals,” but Pakistan had neither committed to participating nor received any formal or specific request.

The clarification followed reports by some media outlets over the past few days suggesting that Pakistan was under growing pressure to join the ISF.

Last month, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had said Pakistan was ready to commit troops to a Gaza peace force but had clearly distanced the country from any role in disarming Hamas.

Trump’s Gaza plan, revealed in September this year, had envisaged the deployment of troops from Muslim-majority countries during a transitional ‘stabilisation’ phase.

In November, the UN Security Council adopted a US-drafted resolution endorsing Trump’s plan, including the deployment of the ISF.

Originally published in The News

US forces struck more than 70 Islamic State group targets in Syria on Friday in what President Donald Trump described as “very serious retaliation” for an attack that killed three Americans last weekend.

Washington said a lone gunman from the militant group carried out the December 13 attack in Palmyra — home to UNESCO-listed ancient ruins and once controlled by jihadist fighters — that left two US soldiers and a US civilian dead.

In response, the United States “struck more than 70 targets at multiple locations across central Syria with fighter jets, attack helicopters, and artillery,” US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.

“The operation employed more than 100 precision munitions targeting known ISIS infrastructure and weapons sites,” CENTCOM said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.

Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network that the United States is “inflicting very serious retaliation, just as I promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible,” and that those who attack Americans “WILL BE HIT HARDER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN HIT BEFORE.”

CENTCOM said that US and allied forces have “conducted 10 operations in Syria and Iraq resulting in the deaths or detention of 23 terrorist operatives” following the Palmyra attack, without specifying which groups the militants belonged to.

No safe havens

Syria’s foreign ministry, while not directly commenting on the Friday strikes, said in a post on X that the country is committed to fighting the Islamic State (IS) group and “ensuring that it has no safe havens on Syrian territory, and will continue to intensify military operations against it wherever it poses a threat.”

The Americans killed in the Palmyra attack last weekend were Iowa National Guard sergeants William Howard and Edgar Torres Tovar, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, a civilian from Michigan who worked as an interpreter.

Trump, Hegseth and top military officer General Dan Caine were among the US officials who attended a somber ceremony marking the return of the dead to the United States on Wednesday.

The attack was the first such incident since the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December last year, and Syrian interior ministry spokesman Noureddine al-Baba said the perpetrator was a security forces member who was due to be fired for his “extremist Islamist ideas.”

The US personnel who were targeted were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the international effort to combat IS, which seized swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory in 2014.

The jihadists were ultimately defeated by local ground forces backed by international air strikes and other support, but IS still has a presence in Syria, especially in the country’s vast desert.

Trump has long been skeptical of Washington’s presence in Syria, ordering the withdrawal of troops during his first term but ultimately leaving American forces in the country.

The Pentagon announced in April that the United States would halve the number of US personnel in Syria in the following months, while US envoy for Syria Tom Barrack said in June that Washington would eventually reduce its bases in the country to one.

US forces are currently deployed in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast as well as at Al-Tanf near the border with Jordan.