• 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.”

A passenger train smashed into a herd of elephants in India’s northeast, killing seven animals on the spot, officials said Saturday.

No travellers were injured in the accident in Assam state, home to more than 4,000 of the roughly 22,000 wild elephants in India.

Senior Assam police official VV Rakesh Reddy told AFP that seven jumbos were killed, and one elephant sustained an injury.

Five coaches of the train, which was headed to New Delhi from the remote Mizoram state, were derailed.

Authorities have introduced speed restrictions along routes designated elephant corridors, but the latest accident occurred outside of these zones, Kapinjal Kishore Sharma, an Indian Railways spokesman, said.

“The loco pilot, on observing the herd of elephants, applied emergency brakes. However, elephants dashed with the train,” he said.

Deforestation and construction activity near their habitats force elephants to stray further afield for food, often bringing them into conflict with humans.

According to parliamentary figures, 629 people were killed by elephants across India in 2023-2024.

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