Image of Sydney shooter with India defence attache is AI-generated
- Published on December 23, 2025 at 09:37
- 2 min read
- By Masroor GILANI, AFP Pakistan
As Australian police investigated why gunmen accused of carrying out a deadly shooting at Bondi Beach had travelled to the Philippines, an image was shared in posts falsely claiming it showed one of the attackers meeting an Indian defence official in Manila. The image, which India's Ministry of External Affairs branded as "fake", was flagged as having been made with Google's AI tools.
"Naveed Akram with The Defense Attache of India to the Philippines, Captain Kant Kothari in Manila," reads part of the caption of an image shared on X on December 16, 2025.
"Naveed Akram visited Philipines (sic) on Indian passport before the Bondi Beach attack."
The attached image appears to show two men in conversation while sitting at a table outside a Jollibee fast-food restaurant.
It surfaced after Australian police said they were looking into why the men accused of carrying out the deadly Bondi Beach attack, Sajid Akram and his son Naveed, had travelled to the Philippines a month before the shooting (archived link).
Fifteen people were killed and dozens more wounded when gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney's Bondi Beach (archived link). Police described the mass shooting as a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.
The same image was also shared in similar Facebook and X posts, as details emerged about the alleged shooters.
Philippine authorities said they had spent almost all of November in the Southeast Asian archipelago, with their final destination listed as Davao in the country's south (archived link).
The region has a long history of Islamist insurgencies against central government rule, but the Philippines says there is no evidence the country is being used for "terrorist training".
Indian police said Sajid was an Indian citizen who left his city of Hyderabad in 1998 and has had "limited contact with his family" since. Naveed is an Australian citizen.
The elder gunman was killed in a shootout with police while his son survived.
The circulating image, however, was branded "fake" by India's Ministry of External Affairs in an X post from December 17 that also refuted baseless claims about Indian diplomats in the Philippines (archived link).
"Always stay alert against disinformation and fake posts on social media," it said.
There have been no official reports about either of the gunmen meeting Chandra Kant Kothari in Manila. AFP reached out to the defence attache but no response was forthcoming.
Moreover, a reverse image search on Google found the picture was labelled as "Made with Google AI" in its "About this image" feature.
A subsequent analysis conducted with Google's SynthID tool -- launched in May 2025 to detect AI-generated content -- identified with a "Very High" degree of confidence that the images were created with the help of its AI tools (archived link).
The falsely shared image also contains visual errors indicative of AI-generated content, such as garbled text on the Jollibee chicken bucket and the uneven size of jeepneys visible in the background.
The image was previously debunked by the Australian Associated Press, and India's The Quint (archived here and here).
AFP has debunked a wave of misinformation about the Bondi Beach shooting and its perpetrators.
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