We have seen this before: brothers committing murders together just as they once shared childhood — like the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing.
We have also seen married couples who pledged themselves to terrorism together, as in the San Bernardino attack.
But the assault that struck Sydney in December 2025 — when Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24, opened fire during a Hanukkah celebration in the Bondi area — revealed a pattern that is both rarer and more unsettling: the radicalization of a father and his son. This form of “intergenerational collaboration” poses a unique challenge not only to security agencies, but to the psychological and social order that assumes a father is a child’s first protector of life, not an instigator to its demise.
In his seminal work The Mind of the Terrorist, neuroscientist and psychology professor Jeff Victoroff argues that terrorism is not necessarily the product of mental illness or madness, but rather of what he calls “psycho-logic.” That logic becomes especially potent when it is transmitted through the channel of fatherhood.
Psychologist Lana Qassqas told Alhurra that the type of Bondi violence was not acquired solely through conscious learning or direct indoctrination, but through “unconscious identification” formed within primary relationships. For Naveed, Sajid was not merely a father. He became the ultimate moral model, the source of symbolic legitimacy and the ideological architect of his son’s worldview.
Victoroff writes that terrorist groups can be understood as “psychological families” that offer belonging and a clear identity — spaces in which an individual’s identity fully merges with that of the group.
In Sydney, however, there was no external group for Naveed to join. His biological family itself became the terrorist cell, making the fusion of identity complete and irreversible.
Insecure Attachment
Qassqas offers a structural reading of the relationship between Sajid and Naveed, describing it as one of “insecure attachment.” In such relationships, the boundary between the father’s self and the son’s self dissolves. Rather than containing his son’s anxieties and guiding him toward maturity, Sajid assumed a role of mobilization and injection.
This lack of boundaries likely reduced Naveed to an instrument for fulfilling his father’s latent impulses. Qassqas says the father most likely “injected his son with violence and burdened him with a closed narrative.” While such cases are rare in the history of terrorism, she notes that paternal authority makes the father’s influence over the son the most plausible trajectory in the Sydney attack. She does not entirely rule out the possibility that the son influenced the father — particularly if the father’s personality was weak — but considers that scenario unlikely.
The father was not merely a teacher. He served as the logistical and psychological anchor, training alongside his son in weapons use and marksmanship, much as fathers elsewhere might train their children to hunt or pursue hobbies. The son operated within a distorted notion of filial obedience, shaped by a religious framework imposed by the father.
Engineering Hatred: Echo Chambers at Home
Why would a father lead his own child into certain death — and the destruction of their family? Victoroff suggests that the primary driver is often a belief that the individual or group is the victim of profound injustice. In the case of Sajid and Naveed, that sense of grievance was cultivated inside the home.
Qassqas describes how households can turn into ideological echo chambers, where violent narratives are recycled and justified as acts of self-defense against an existential threat. Within these closed spaces, extremist behavior is emotionally and materially rewarded, the humanity of others — in this case, the celebrants in Bondi — is stripped away, and they are framed as legitimate targets. Terrorism becomes a gradual pathway within the father-son relationship, beginning with bedtime stories and ending with gunfire on the beach.
Victoroff notes that “positive social bonds, such as love and family loyalty, can be distorted to serve antisocial ends.” This may be the most painful explanation of the Sydney attack: the love meant to protect Naveed is the very force that led him to become a killer — and either dead or imprisoned.
Qassqas argues that the pair did not necessarily suffer from conventional psychological disorders, but rather from an extreme emotional-cognitive organization built on dehumanizing victims to make killing possible without guilt.
When Sajid and Naveed walked toward Bondi, they did not see people celebrating a holiday. They saw symbols of injustice, implanted by the father in his son’s mind over years. This explains the cold-blooded nature of the attack: the son viewed his father as the hero and moral authority, while the father saw his son as a natural biological and violent extension of himself.
For the psychology of terrorism, the Sydney attack is a global alarm bell. Its most troubling aspect lies in where this form of extremism grows — in the blind spot of security and social systems, inside the home, at the heart of the intimate bond between father and son. There is no algorithm that can monitor conversations at the dinner table or in bedrooms, on hunting trips or during shared hobbies. And there is no law that can prevent a father from planting hatred in a child’s mind through family upbringing.
Rami Al Amine
A Lebanese writer and journalist living in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from the Faculty of Religious Sciences at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of the poetry collection “I Am a Great Poet” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2007); the political pamphlet “Ya Ali, We Are No Longer the People of the South” (Lebanese Plans, 2008); a book on social media titled “The Facebookers” (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2012); and “The Pakistanis: A Statue’s Biography” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2024).
