Police probe killer’s targeting of women in Sydney mall attack

SYDNEY – Australian police said Monday they are investigating why a 40-year-old man with mental illness appeared to target women as he roamed a Sydney shopping mall with a large knife, killing six people and injuring a dozen more.

Videos shared on social media showed unshaven itinerant Joel Cauchi pursuing mostly female victims as he rampaged through the vast, crowded Westfield shopping complex in Bondi Junction on Saturday afternoon.

Five of the six victims killed were women, as were most of those wounded.

“The videos speak for themselves don’t they, and that’s certainly a line of inquiry for us,” New South Wales police commissioner Karen Webb said.

“That’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 men,” she told national broadcaster ABC.

Webb stressed that police could not know what was in the mind of the attacker.

“That’s why it’s important now that detectives spend so much time interviewing those who know him.”

Cauchi’s Facebook profile said he came from Toowoomba, near Brisbane, and had attended a local high school and university.

His parents say he had suffered from mental health issues since he was a teenager.

The last of Cauchi’s six victims was identified Monday as Yixuan Cheng, a young Chinese woman who was a student at the University of Sydney.

The other women killed were a designer, a volunteer surf lifesaver, the daughter of an entrepreneur, and a new mother whose wounded nine-month-old baby is in hospital.

The mother, 38-year-old Ashlee Good, handed her bleeding baby girl to strangers in desperation before being rushed to hospital where she died of her injuries.

Her baby, named Harriet, is in a serious condition in a Sydney hospital but is expected to improve, health authorities said.

The only man killed was 30-year-old Pakistani Faraz Tahir, who had been working as a security guard when he was stabbed.