Sayson, the hotel employee, said the longest they left their room for was one to two hours at a time.
She said there was no CCTV footage of them because the hotel’s recording capacity was for only a week, but military officers had come and taken away the hotel’s computer hard drive.
Naveed Akram used a Philippine phone number when registering with the hotel.
According to the hotel worker, the terrorists rarely spoke with staff and weren’t seen with any visitors. Wrappings from fast-food chain Jollibee had been found in their room.
“We thought they probably had a business here in the city, since they would go out and just come back again,” Sayson told local news site MindaNews. They each had one large piece of luggage and a backpack, and paid cash when they extended their stay, she told the site.
The passports of the Bondi Beach terrorists, Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, as shown on television in the Philippines.
Rooms at the GV Hotel in Davao can be booked online for as little as $22 a night. The hotel is close to the city’s business district.
Davao is the main city on the southern island of Mindanao, where Islamist militant groups, including Islamic State East Asia (ISEA), have been active for many years.
NSW Police found homemade Islamic State flags in the gunmen’s car after the massacre, but Philippine officials have said there is no evidence they trained with Islamist militants while in the country.
Rooms at the hotel can be booked online for as little as $22 a night.
Philippine National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano said in a statement: “A mere visit does not support allegations of terrorist training, and the duration of their stay would not have allowed for any meaningful or structured training.”
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The Australian government’s national security website says ISEA “remains a deadly terrorist threat in the Philippines”, where it has been based, and the country is “a target destination for foreign terrorist fighters”.
But Ano said only remnants of Islamic State remained after it was significantly degraded by the armed forces since the 2017 siege of Marawi, a Muslim city in Mindanao’s west, six to eight hours’ drive from Davao.
He said there had been no recorded terrorist training by IS-affiliated groups since 2017.
IS affiliates were responsible for the bombing of a Catholic Mass at a university gymnasium in Marawi in December 2023 that left four people dead, and the US State Department reported the Philippines remained in the top 20 nations in the world for terrorist incidents in 2023.
However, according to the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the “neutralisation of high-value individuals” and other efforts to crush militants in Mindanao have reduced local terrorist group numbers from 1257 members in 2016 to 50 in 2025.
Philippine government forces fought an intense battle to recapture the southern city of Marawi on Mindanao from Islamic State fighters in 2017.Credit: Getty Images
The military on Wednesday released a list of 10 key militant figures who had been killed in security operations since 2017, the most recent a leader of the Islamic State-linked Dawlah Islamiyah-Hassan Group on December 7.
The list also included the suspected mastermind of the Marawi University bombing, whom the military reported had died in a clash between pro-IS militants and Philippine soldiers in February 2023.
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