Attack in a Sydney shopping center: the “enormous courage” of the policeman who put an end to the bloody raid

As shoppers at the popular Westfield Bondi Junction shopping center ran in desperation, trying to escape the man who had fatally wounded several people with a knife, and alarms sounded calling for the building to be evacuated, A lone policewoman mustered her courage and confronted the attacker.

“He was able to tell her ‘put the gun down’, just once. Then I shot him in the middle of the chest and the attacker fell,” said Jason Dixon, one of the witnesses to what happened on Saturday in the Sydney City Mall.

According to the witness, the police officer Amy Scott he had no choice more than shooting. “He had to shoot him because he kept advancing. He had a knife and it was clear that he wasn’t going to stop. He was advancing towards her and was running looking for someone else to attack,” he said.

“I’m happy she took it, because if she hadn’t he would have stabbed her too,” the witness added to the newspaper. The Telegraph newspaper.

Another person who witnessed the attack at a busy shopping center in eastern Australia said so 7News that if the officer had not fired, the assailant – around 40 years old – “would have continued” with his mission.

The officer is a high-ranking inspector in the ranks of the District Police, Eastern Suburbs Police Region Command, and has served in the force for more than ten years. That borough’s police commissioner, Karen Webb, said the uniformed officer showed up “enormous courage and daring.”

The district’s deputy commissioner, Anthony Cooke, explained that the officer confronted the attacker on the fifth floor of the shopping center.

“As she continued to walk quickly behind him to reach him, he turned, looked at her and raised the knife. The officer fired his weapon and that person is now dead,” the police official said.

A few seconds after the injured man collapsed, video images show that the policewoman – together with a colleague in uniform – dragged the attacker away from the shop window and began to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

The man was later rescued by emergency services, but died at the scene. The officer “is doing well under the circumstances,” Webb said.

“He showed enormous courage and audacity. She will have to be formally interrogated tomorrow,” the police official added.

During a national press conference to report on the incident, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also highlighted Agent Scott’s risky work.

“She is certainly a hero. “Not just because of the lives he saved, but because he remembers that these people wearing uniforms are people fleeing from danger, not running away,” she added.

There is still no official information on the identity of the attacker who stabbed six people to death and injured eight others, including a nine-month-old baby, during a bloody break-in last Saturday at the Westfield shopping center in Bondi Junction, in the suburbs of eastern Sydney.