Australia police probe why suspect in Sydney mall stabbing targeted women

MELBOURNE, Australia, April 15, (AP): Australian police are examining why a lone assailant who stabbed six people to death in a busy Sydney shopping mall and injured more than a dozen others targeted women while avoiding men, a police commissioner said on Monday. The killer’s father blamed his son’s frustration at not having a girlfriend.

Police shot and killed the homeless assailant, Joel Cauchi, during his knife attack in the Westfield Bondi Junction mall on Saturday near world-famous Bondi Beach.

Police have ruled out terrorism and said the 40-year-old had a history of mental illness.

New South Wales state Police Commissioner Karen Webb said detectives would question Cauchi’s family in a bid to determine his motive. CCTV footage from the mall showed Cauchi targeted women.

“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they? And that’s certainly a line of inquiry for us,” Webb said.

“It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives that that seems to be an area of interest: that the offender had focused on women and avoided the men,” Webb added.

The attacker’s father Andrew Cauchi said he knew why his son, who suffered from schizophrenia, had targeted women.

“Because he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain,” the visibly distraught 76-year-old told reporters outside his home in Toowoomba in Queensland state, an 870-kilometer (540-mile) drive across the New South Wales border from Sydney.

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Strong quake hits PNG: A strong magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck Papua New Guinea on Monday, authorities said, but there was no tsunami alert or immediate reports of damage.

The quake struck the South Pacific Island nation 110 kilometers (68 miles) southeast of the West New Britain provincial capital Kimbe at a depth of 68 kilometers (42 miles) shortly before 7 am local time (21:00 GMT), the US Geological Survey said in a statement.

The US Tsunami Warning System said there was no tsunami alert.

Papua New Guinea sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” the arc of seismic faults around the Pacific Ocean where much of the world’s earthquake and volcanic activity occurs.