Filed in April and only just confirmed, the new counts add ten 'shoot at with intent to murder' charges, six firearm during arrest counts, and three grievous bodily harm counts to the case against Naveed Akram.
The 19 new offences filed against Naveed Akram in April and only recently confirmed by authorities describe a broader set of victims and moments than the 15 murder charges filed after the 14 December 2025 shooting at a Jewish festival on Sydney's Bondi Beach.
Akram, 24, is accused of killing 15 people at the festival. He was critically injured and transferred to prison. According to BBC News reporting by Simon Atkinson and Lana Lam, he had already faced 59 charges: 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one count of committing a terrorist act. The 19 new charges, filed in April and only now confirmed via court records seen by the BBC, are divided across three categories: ten counts of "shoot at with intent to murder," six counts of discharging a firearm with intent to resist arrest, and three counts of causing wounding or grievous bodily harm with intent to murder. Akram's total is 78.
The new categories point to specific acts the murder charges alone did not capture. Ten counts of shooting at people with intent to murder describe targeted encounters that ended in survival. The 40 attempted-murder counts already on the case covered some of this ground, but the distinct "shoot at" framing implies separate offences the prosecution now treats as distinct, suggesting a fuller reconstruction of the December attack than the original charges captured. The three grievous-bodily-harm counts describe injuries above the attempted-murder threshold but short of killing. Read together, they point to a broader set of victims than the 15 deaths alone implied.
The six counts of discharging a firearm to resist arrest are the most telling. They describe what the prosecution alleges happened as Akram was being taken into custody, after the festival attack had ended. Court documents seen by the BBC include allegations of months of planning and a pre-attack reconnaissance video released in October that carried an Islamic State flag. The new firearm-during-arrest counts add a claim that a weapon was in Akram's hands during the moments police moved to detain him, a detail that reshapes the theory of what 14 December looked like past the festival itself.
None of this has been tested. Akram has made a series of short court appearances and is yet to enter a plea. His next court date is in August. His defence counsel has described the new charges as expected for a matter of this scale. The Joint Counter Terrorism Team, the Australian federal joint investigative body leading the case, is "progressing" through the evidence, including roughly 230,000 CCTV items and devices linked to alleged associates that are still awaiting translation.
The 78 charges on Akram's file are a snapshot of what the Joint Counter Terrorism Team knew when the new counts were filed in April. They are not the final shape of the prosecution. What the August hearing reveals, in terms of additional counts, additional victims, or named associates, will depend on what the unreviewed CCTV and devices actually contain.