&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Did search interest for Naveed Akram spike in Tel Aviv ahead of Bondi Beach terror attack?")
There is an epistemic unease surrounding the Bondi Beach terror attack. At least 15 people died, and 25 others were injured. 24-year-old Naveed Akram and his 50-year-old father, Sajid Akram, are the prime suspects. However, there are certain anomalies which are too eerie to ignore. Just ahead of the Bondi Beach terror attack on November 14, there was a noticeable spike in search interest for the keyword Naveed Akram in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the past 7 days. Posts on social media claiming that the apparent attack on Bondi Beach was a ‘false flag’ started to circulate. Soon, a group of fact-checkers from Australia, AAP fact check, discredited the claims, saying that they found no evidence that people in Israel searched on Google for the shooter.
So was there a search interest for Naveed Akram in Tel Aviv?
At the outset, when we tried to seek evidence for search data on the keyword "Naveed Akram", in Google Trends, we could not find any evidence of the search. Here is the genuinely interesting part: What does not appear in usual search results can be found using a VPN. Which means Google Trends is showing different historical data based on the user's location, which would be unprecedented. So, below are the four screenshots we collected when searching for Naveed Akram from different regions, such as Romania, Canada and Japan.
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Google Trends data at December 16, 8.35 am IST Photograph: ()
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Google Trends data at December 16, 12.21 am IST Photograph: ()
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Google Trends data at December 15, 12.17 am IST Photograph: ()
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Google Trends data at December 15, 11.07 am IST Photograph: ()
What we found is that within just a few hours of a gap, the data trend is different. It is showing three different dates for the pre-attack search of the keyword Naveed Akram within Israel.
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What does this mean?
There are a few possible explanations, such as active historical data manipulation, or the data is genuinely fluctuating because of processing issues, or different versions are being shown to different users, or different Google server has different versions. However, one thing seems to be popping out: there was a reasonable search interest for the keyword Naveed Akram in Israel, ahead of the Bondi Beach terror attack on December 14. Though this does not prove the terror attack was a 'false flag', or that Israel had orchestrated it. But it hints there is something unusual with the Google trend data, and the name was being discussed within Israel, but it does not reveal the intent and identity of those conducting the searches.
