“We got them into the store … rang for help,” one of the men said.
Emergency services at the scene.Credit: Oscar Colman
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.
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”.
Images circulated on social media of the incident at Bondi Junction on Saturday afternoon.
“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.”
Multiple posts on social media show crowds fleeing as emergency services swarmed the centre.
A witness who did not wish to be named said she was about to go into Coles in Bondi Junction when she saw a man pull out a knife first and then opened fire. “I looked up and bolted,” the witness said.
Two police officers stand near a suspected offender.
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.
“I heard a man scream as we were about to go down the escalator”, Williams said, and as she left through the fire escape she heard three gunshots.
This was posted to social media from inside Bondi Westfield – “Prayers for any victims. Please don’t let this be the new normal.”Credit: Twitter/Mark Hudson @mhudson
There were no police in the building and no alarms were going off when this happened she said.
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.
About 100 people stampeded out the exit, she said.
“You’d never expect something like this in Sydney,” Johnston said.
The Australian Federal Police are consulting with NSW Police and if necessary will activate the joint counter terrorism team, sources said.
Authorities are still investigating the motive for the attack and warned people not to jump to conclusions.
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 days to process.
More to come
Source Agencies
