Bondi Beach massacre suspect Naveed Akram underwent boxing training at a Sydney combat gym called the HIT Squad months before Sunday’s deadly terror attack.
The Daily Mail has obtained exclusive footage of the hulking 24-year-old sparring in the massive 780 sqm facility in Moorebank, in western Sydney, in April this year.
The family-run gym, whose owner asked not to be named and has removed the video from Instagram, described Akram as ‘a loner who didn’t say two words’ to anyone at the gym.
The video, first unearthed by independent news outlet SCN Worldstar, shows Akram duking it out with a smaller but more skilled opponent who lands multiple punches on the alleged terrorist’s head.
Wearing black trackpants, a navy Umbro T-shirt, white trainers and headgear, Akram is virtually chased around the ring as his punches fall short and the other boxer’s hit home.
After the training bout at HIT Squad – described as the ‘ultimate gym’ – Akram rips off his head guard, bends over in apparent exhaustion, and then dumps his boxing gloves on the side of the ring.
According to HIT Squad, Naveed attended the gym sporadically for up to two years and was ‘a weirdo… no one knows about him, no one cares about him… maybe a bit slow? I get that vibe about him’.
HIT Squad’s website says it aims to provide weight training, martial arts and functional training ‘coached by some of the best in the industry, including world champion fighters… to provide you with all the right tools for ultimate results’.
It has three major gyms spread over the size of a large residential block on Heathcote Road behind the South-Western Motorway, and its mission is ‘to establish a strong, fit and healthy community’.
HIT gym’s owner told the Daily Mail that Naveed ‘hardly used to train’ and would arrive and leave ‘on his own’.
He said that, given the gym’s diverse clientele, Naveed would have likely trained alongside Jewish people at some stage, but ‘never hung out with anyone’ – although one gymgoer said he had found Naveed ‘kind, polite and helpful’.
The gym owner also said Naveed ‘wasn’t very good’ at boxing, neither was he consistent at training: ‘He’d come for three days and then you don’t see him for six months.’
The gym is about 8km from the Bonnyrigg home where Naveed and his father Sajid lived while allegedly planning the attack targeting Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday afternoon at Bondi Beach.
Father and son allegedly killed 15 people – including Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 87, and Matilda, a 10-year-old schoolgirl whose last name hasn’t been disclosed by her family.
Sajid, 50, was shot dead by police. Naveed was also shot by police, but has regained consciousness after being in a coma and has now been charged with 59 offences relating to the alleged terror attack.
The gym’s owner said his family was ‘in total shock and absolutely gutted that he has anything to do with our gym’.
‘I am sick to my stomach,’ he said.
‘In our gym, there [are] a lot of people we get close to.
‘We have 200 members and I am a very engaging person, but definitely not [with] that guy… because there was nothing there.’
The boxing session caught on film took place eight months before Naveed and Sajid Akram allegedly underwent almost a month of military-style training overseas.
A senior counter-terrorism official has revealed the two left Sydney for the Philippines just weeks before they allegedly opened fire at the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi.
The father and son allegedly arrived on November 1 in the Philippines, a region that has been a hotspot for Islamist militants since the early 1990s, when terrorist training camps relocated from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to southern Mindanao.
They allegedly left on November 28, a Bureau of Immigration spokesperson said on Tuesday.
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