Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been examining fatal shooting of 15 people at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. As part of BBC Verify’s analysis of the attack the team has examined:

• What kind of guns were used by the two shooters
• The numbers behind gun ownership and firearms registration in Australia
• What we know about a rise in antisemitic incidents in Australia, given hate crimes aren’t centrally tracked
• A fake news website which spread a false claim about the identity of the “hero” who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers

Our coverage has also touched on new examples of AI being used to make spurious claims including false images of US President Donald Trump released with the Epstein files and AI-generated TikTok videos that Ukraine says are the latest Russian disinformation campaign.

Our live coverage will be back tomorrow, but keep an eye out for BBC Verify’s minute-by-minute video analysis of the Bondi Beach attack on the BBC News website and app later.

Gerry Georgieva
BBC Verify researcher

Gun ownership registration and accompanying data in Australia is decentralised, so there is a lack of official figures to give a clear picture of how many firearms there are in the country following the Bondi Beach shooting.

The independent Australia Institute think tank estimates there are over four million guns as of 2024, external, equating to 15 guns per 100 people.

This is up from an estimated 2.2 million in 2001, a figure which itself had declined by around a million following the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre and Australia’s states signing a National Firearms Agreement, external increasing gun regulation.

Following a 2022 shooting, external, in which which one of the perpetrators was able to get ammunition in Queensland despite having his license suspended in New South Wales, the states agreed to work together on a National Firearms Register.

While this register is not yet in place, the idea behind it is that gun crime can be combated more effectively by sharing information around issues like license regulation, gun theft and gun violence.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

I reported earlier today on how Ahmed al Ahmed, the bystander who wrestled a gun from one of the Bondi Beach attackers, was falsely named by a fake news website as Edward Crabtree.

The claim spread quickly on X – “The name is Edward Crabtree a local from Bondi, not some Ahmed” wrote multiple verified users in posts that reached more than a million viewers.

X’s AI chatbot Grok then began to repeat this claim when asked by users about Ahmed’s identity.

The chatbot also falsely claimed that a video of Ahmed disarming the gunman was an old video, that an image of Ahmed after the attack was an Israeli hostage in Gaza and that video of the shooting was actually of a cyclone from March.

Dr Peter Bentley, a computer scientist from University College London, says AI chatbots like Grok use training data and the internet to generate the most plausible answer to a question which can cause problems when new information emerges.

He adds that fresh information like new footage from a shooting means the data available to the chatbot “is not enough, or not accurate, for them to get it right and their ‘plausible answer’ is plain wrong”.

Tom Edgington
BBC Verify senior journalist

Appearing before a committee of MPs, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was asked about his government’s pledge to reduce the size of the House of Lords - the UK Parliament’s second chamber.

Labour is introducing a law to remove the 92 remaining hereditary peers in the Lords, external - those members who inherited their titles from a parent.

However, according to the House of Lords data dashboard, external Starmer has created 62 new "life" peers who do not pass their titles on.

And last week the government announced the creation of 34 new members of the Lords, external, taking the total appointed under Starmer to 96 so far.

Sir Keir said there was “an imbalance” in the parties represented in the upper house. But he added the “overarching work to reduce the size of the House of Lords is ongoing”.

Despite being the party of government, Labour has 209 of the total 822 members of the Lords whereas the Conservatives - the official opposition - have 281, external.

You can read more about the government’s plans to reform the House of Lords here.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire

During his appearance at the House of Commons Liaison Committee earlier, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was asked by one MP about a clash with the Conservative leader of the opposition over the number of teachers under Labour.

During last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, he claimed the number had gone up since Labour came to power while Kemi Badenoch said it was down by 400.

Back then, we checked the latest figures and found that there were 400 fewer full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers in 2024, external, compared with 2023.

But the figures didn’t show how much of the reduction happened under the Conservatives or Labour as there was a change of government in 2024.

Starmer told the committee he had been referring to the number of teachers in secondary and specialist schools which he said had gone up, while the number in primary schools had fallen.

That is correct.

The number of FTE teachers, external in secondary schools went up by 1,400 and in special schools and Pupil Referral Units by 900 in 2024, compared with 2023.

There was a drop in state-funded nurseries and and primary schools of 2,900 over the same period.

We have asked the Department for Education why the difference between these two sets of figures isn’t 400.

Shruti Menon and Barbara Metzler
BBC Verify

Schools in Delhi and surrounding areas have moved classes online and construction has been banned as the Indian capital grapples with hazardous air quality.

India’s capital has been engulfed in a severe pollution haze, severely restricting visibility and affecting flights and train services.

A comparison of satellite-monitored nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels in Delhi and nearby areas of northern India from October to mid-December shows concentrations of the pollutant gas have increased sharply in recent days.

Our analysis uses Sentinel-5P satellites that detect how NO2 absorbs sunlight and converts that information into the amount present in the air.

NO2 levels indicate pollution which is mainly linked to vehicle exhausts, combustion and industrial activity.

The amount of NO2 recorded in December has more than doubled since the beginning of the month and is at by far the highest level since the start of October.

This is likely down to a reduction in wind speeds and temperatures, which can trap pollutants closer to the ground.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Almost 100 photos from the estate of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee last Friday.

One of the photographs released shows Donald Trump - before he became president - standing with six women whose faces have been redacted. Some social media users have attempted to use AI tools to recreate their faces.

We’ve reported before on misinformation fuelled by “AI-enhanced” images of President Trump and the man suspected of shooting Charlie Kirk.

One “AI-enhanced” version of the newly-released photo of Trump with the six women appears to have been made using Google AI because the watermark for the Gemini platform is still visible in the bottom right of the frame. One of the women’s faces has also been deformed by the process.

This AI photo has been shared widely online including by those who say it shows that none of the women in the picture were underage.

A second “AI-enhanced” version of the picture circulating online was made using another Google AI tool called Nano Banana, according to the Instagram user that posted it.

As you can see, the AI-generated woman’s faces made by the two platforms are very different.

That’s because when you ask an AI tool to create or enhance an image it is just making a prediction based on the images it has been trained on, Prof Thomas Nowotny, head of the AI research group at the University of Sussex, told BBC Verify.

“If you are working on an image to extract more information about an underlying truth, it is a risky path to take,” he said.

Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify researcher

We’ve been contacting weapons experts to find out more about the types of weapons used by the gunmen during the Bondi attack.

Looking at footage, NR Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, said “two sporting shotguns” used in the mass shooting may have been a specific type of Stoeger M3000 M3K straight-pull model.

According to Jenzen-Jones, straight-pull sporting shotguns are a commonly-owned weapon as they offer a relatively fast-firing action under current firearms law in Australia.

Experts from the open-source intelligence firm Janes said another rifle used by one of gunmen during the attack was highly likely to be a Beretta BRX1 - a gun designed for hunting large game.

Both weapons can be legally held under New South Wales and Australian firearm licensing laws, external.

Based on initial reporting, Jenzen-Jones said it was possible the weapons featured could have been legally acquired by the attackers.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Ukraine’s state disinformation centre, external has accused Russia of using AI-generated TikTok videos of Ukrainians supposedly fleeing the country to spread disinformation, which it says aim to “demoralize the military” and convince civilians that serving in the army “makes no sense”.

One video reviewed by BBC Verify appears to show a man in military clothing saying he is now in the Carpathian Mountains after fleeing the battlefield and “the business of dying for someone else’s wealth”.

This clip has gathered almost 400,000 views on TikTok alone after being posted by an account called “Diary of a Dodger”, which has shared a stream of videos claiming to show young men on the run and older women encouraging them to leave Ukraine.

Although we cannot confirm who is behind the account and the creation of the video, there are indicators of AI-generation - including it being precisely 15 seconds long, low music being added in the background and the man’s face being perfectly lit.

None of the videos on the account are longer than 15 seconds, many feature the same low music and some have other obvious red flags for AI, such as scrambled letters and deformed hands.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve traced false claims on social media about the identity of the “hero” who wrestled a gun from one of the Bondi Beach attackers back to a fake news website.

In the hours after the attack the man who confronted one of the gunmen was named as Ahmed al Ahmed. But false claims began to spread online that the bystander was a Bondi local called “Edward Crabtree”.

The claim was first published on a fake news site called the Daily. Public databases show the website’s internet domain was only registered yesterday.

Its top story names “Edward Crabtree” as the “national hero” that disarmed the gunman, offers vivid descriptions of the incident, detailed information about his supposed background and fake quotes from police.

It includes real pictures and some accurate details, but there are indications the text is AI-generated. These include unusually descriptive language and the repeated use of the em-dash punctuation mark (—).

This entire fake news website appears to have been made in order to publish this single fabricated story.

All the links on the site either don’t work or lead to its only other full story about a fake climate change summit.

Another sign the site is fake is that every time a page is reloaded, the thumbnail images for the other stories change and these images are totally unrelated to the headlines.

I'll bring you more shortly on how this fake story was amplified across social media.

Gerry Georgieva
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, Reuters

Australia’s New South Wales police confirmed that one of the gunmen at Bondi Beach - the 50-year-old Sajid Akram - owned six registered firearms and held a recreation category A/B gun license.

This is not unusual for the state.

Getting a license in New South Wales simply requires that, external the person is over 18, is fit, has completed a training and safety course and has provided a “genuine reason” for needing one.

The, external, external“genuine, external reasons”, external for category A/B licenses, which are for recreational shooters, cover a variety of activities like sport shooting, hunting and pest control.

There’s no limit on the number of guns such a licensee can have and one individual was even recorded to own 298 firearms as of June, external.

Latest statistics for August, external shows that 259,107 license holders had over 1.14 million guns across the state, meaning that the average licensee owned more than four guns. Over 973,000 of the registered firearms were category A/B.

For a state with 8.58 million people, external, it equates to 13 guns per 100 people.

Becky Dale and Aidan McNamee
BBC Verify

There is no centralised system of tracking hate crime events in Australia - each state and territory manages its own definitions and responses.The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which advocates nationally on behalf of Australian Jews, has published annual reports since 1990 on the number of antisemitic incidents occurring across the country.

The latest report, external says the number of incidents has risen in the past two years, which the ECAJ says is also likely to be an incomplete picture due to under-reporting.

Incidents peaked at 2,062 in the year covering October 2023 to September 2024.

In the following year to September 2025 recorded incidents fell slightly but remained high at 1,652, still more than three times higher than the highest annual count recorded before the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The types of incidents they include are physical and verbal abuse, vandalism, public graffiti, posters or stickers, and threatening messages in letters or emails to Jewish individuals or institutions. Messages sent on social media are recorded separately.

In the year ending September 2025, the ECAJ identified verbal abuse and public messaging such as graffiti, posters and stickers as the two largest categories of incident.

Richard Irvine-Brown and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify

Image source, Telegram

We’ve been reviewing various videos being uploaded following drone attacks overnight in Russia and Ukraine.

Among them are images of drones or missiles being shot out of the air apparently taken from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

One video shows an object on fire crashing into a residential area of the city near the north bank of the Don river. From the footage we can’t tell exactly where the object landed, but we can identify the neighbourhood from distinctive buildings at the junction of Pereulok Uritskogo and Ulitsa Magnitogorskaya.

When trying to identify urban locations at night it is often useful to look for patches of dark among the streetlights - these could be fields or rivers - which meant we could identify the river Don in the background of the video.

Meanwhile, a separate photograph shows a fire in a residential area of the town on the north bank of the Don river. We were able to verify the location by matching the railway line, river and a bridge across it with what can be seen on satellite maps.

In both cases, reverse-searching the photo and frames from the video show both first appeared overnight on Russian social media.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Image source, X

Through Sunday our team sourced, verified and distributed more than 30 different videos of the Bondi Beach shooting, many of them highly graphic.

In the early afternoon we got our clearest insight into how the attack took place through an almost 11-minute continuous video.

It starts with one gunman already on the bridge while the second shoots at a fleeing person. The attacker on the bridge fires towards the event almost continuously, pausing only to reload.

The second attacker crosses the bridge and down steps on the far side, walking towards the event. He continues firing until being disarmed by a member of the public. He then returns to the bridge and picks up a spare weapon.

It takes about four minutes from the start of this video before we hear shots being fired back, and see the gunmen taking cover. One of the gunmen is hit just under a minute later, then the second is shot after a further minute of shooting.

Right now our team are piecing together all the footage we have and are getting insight from weapons and law enforcement experts, to bring you a minute-by-minute analysis of the attack. We’ll bring you more on this later.

Verification by Benedict Garman, Alex Akhurst and Shayan Sardarizadeh

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

During high-profile incidents like Sunday’s shooting at Bondi Beach, a key job for BBC Verify is to source and authenticate videos from the scene and share with teams across BBC News what we have verified.

New South Wales Police first received reports that shots had been fired at a park in Bondi Beach at around 18:47 local time (07:47 GMT) on Sunday and videos of the attack started to emerge on social media shortly after that.

The first footage we verified showed two gunmen firing from a small bridge that connects a car park and the beach where the Hanukkah event was taking place.

A second video shows police on the same bridge later administering CPR to two motionless men. There are bloodstains on the floor and an armoured vest has been discarded nearby along with multiple bullet casings.

The third video we verified is one which has been shared widely since it first emerged. It shows a man in a white shirt tackle one of the gunmen, take his gun and turn it back on him before the suspect walks away.

You can watch it below.

Verification by Benedict Garman, Alex Akhurst and Shayan Sardarizadeh

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

Around a year ago Prime Minister Keir Starmer launched his “Plan for Change” setting out targets he said would be met by the end of this Parliament in 2029.

So ahead of Starmer being questioned by senior MPs on the House of Commons Liaison Committee this afternoon, I’ve taken a look at how the government has been performing on three key goals.

Housebuilding

The government said it would deliver 1.5 million net additional homes in England over the parliament.

That would imply around 300,000 a year on average, but we're currently running at just over 200,000 a year.

Ministers say they are going to ramp up to the 1.5 million target in the later years of the parliament - however, the delivery rate so far is down on the final years of the last Conservative government.

Health

The government has promised that 92% of patients in England will be seen within 18 weeks.

At the moment around 62% are - but there are signs of a slight pick up over the past year.

Living standards

The government pledged to grow real household disposable income per person - roughly what’s left after taxes, benefits and inflation.

There has been some movement on this measure with the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasting 0.5% growth in living standards on average a year.

However that would still make it the second weakest Parliament since the 1970s. The worst was under the previous Conservative government between 2019 and 2024 when living standards declined.

Richard Irvine-Brown and Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify

Image source, Telegram

Ukraine and Russia have each come under significant airborne attack overnight, including Ukraine’s Air Force reporting 153 Russian projectiles being launched and Russia’s Defence Ministry reporting 146 drones from Ukraine being intercepted.

We’re looking into videos and pictures of the aftermath of these incidents, including images showing multiple projectiles being shot out of the sky in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.We also saw images from late on Sunday of smoke, said to be from the south of Belgorod city, in southern Russia.

A daytime image shows damage to the Luch thermal power plant in the city, which we verified by matching the buildings and chimney to satellite images and older photos.

Meanwhile, we're analysing at least six videos shared overnight showing distant smoke and with the sound of explosions, claimed to be from the Kashira region of Moscow.

We’ll update you later if we manage to verify these incidents, as well as any footage showing strikes inside Ukraine which we’re also examining.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

We’re keen to hear what you think the BBC Verify team should be looking into.

We're interested in investigating claims you may've seen online in your social feeds. We're also keen to know if you've think an image may have been made using artificial intelligence to spread disinformation.

You can also get in touch with BBC Verify if you've got a question about how we verify video posted online or work with satellite imagery.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Ukraine reportedly launched dozens of drones towards Russia with the defence ministry in Moscow saying it shot down 130, including 15 flown towards Moscow.

We’re checking reports of explosions being heard on the outskirts of the Russian capital and the temporary closure of two of its airports. Our first post this morning shows how we verified a picture of an explosion in Rostov, southern Russia.

BBC Verify is continuing to work with publicly available sources to get more detail on yesterday’s shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

Fifteen people were killed when two gunmen opened fire as Jewish people took part in a Hanukkah event. Our team has verified videos showing what happened yesterday afternoon and is also looking to find out more about the two suspects through their internet footprints and other public sources.

We’ll continue to build up background information about the two suspects - father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram - and work on a minute-by-minute timeline of what happened on Sunday.

Elsewhere, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces questions from senior MPs in the House of Commons later when he appears before the Liaison Committee this afternoon. Our journalists will be listening out for checkable claims and we’ll bring those to you here.