As police continue to piece together the deadliest antisemitic attack in Australia in years, the mother of one of the terrorists is insisting her son is “a good boy” — apparently one who carries out massacres of Jews from time to time…

Verena Akram, the mother of 24-year-old Bondi attacker Naveed Akram, told the Sydney Morning Herald that she does not believe her son could be involved in Sunday night’s mass shooting targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. Her defense leaned heavily on a familiar refrain heard after extremist violence around the world: the alleged attacker was quiet, harmless, and misunderstood.

“He doesn’t have a firearm. He doesn’t even go out. He doesn’t mix around with friends. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t go to bad places,” Akram said. “He goes to work, he comes home, he goes to exercise and that’s it.”

According to Akram, her son and his father, Sajid Akram, who had recently returned from a trip to the Philippines, told the family they had gone on a fishing trip along the Australian coast. On Sunday, she said, her son called to offer an alibi.

“He rings me up and said, ‘Mum, I just went for a swim. I went scuba diving. We’re going to eat now,’” she recalled, adding that he claimed they planned to stay inside because of the heat.

Police tell a very different story.

Authorities say they recovered explosive devices and an Islamic State flag from a vehicle connected to the suspects — findings that directly contradict claims that Naveed Akram had no connection to violence or extremism. Despite this, his mother insisted she could not recognize her son in photographs from the attack and maintained his innocence.

“Anyone would wish to have a son like my son,” she said. “He’s a good boy.”

For between 10 and 20 minutes on Sunday evening, gunmen opened fire on a crowded Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach, spraying bullets into a gathering of families, children, and elderly attendees as panic erupted along the shoreline. Roughly 1,000 people fled across the sand and into surrounding streets on what had been a hot, crowded weekend night.

Victims ranged in age from 10 to 87. Among the wounded and killed were two Chabad rabbis a Holocaust survivor, a Slovak woman, and a 10-year-old old. Forty people were hospitalized, including two police officers who were listed in serious but stable condition.

Naveed Akram, an unemployed former bricklayer, had been laid off two months before the attack. He lived at home with his parents, a 22-year-old sister, and a 20-year-old brother. He was a graduate of the Al-Murad Institute, where he studied the Quran.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)