For some the scars are still so raw; others just long to be able to think about something else.

In just five minutes, on the polished floors of the Westfield shopping centre, Cauchi claimed six lives and forever changed countless others.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal NSW Police are no longer convinced Cauchi, a 40-year-old schizophrenic from Queensland, was targeting women in his knife attack on April 13, 2024.

“Do I think he was targeting women? No, I don’t. He stabbed three men and a baby, he was just running around stabbing people,” a senior police source said.

While we will never know what Cauchi was thinking in those moments, what can be told are the accounts of those who witnessed what happened that day.

Mudasar Bashir

Brother of slain Westfield guard Faraz Tahir

In a video of Faraz Tahir’s last moments, you can see his distress.

The security guard from Pakistan, who had moved to Australia for a better life, heard screaming and when he saw Cauchi’s first victims lying in pools of blood on the Westfield floor, there was instantly an urgency to his step.

The fact that Tahir ran towards the knife-wielding attacker is little surprise to his brothers, all three of whom have been in Australia in recent weeks, meeting with everyone from police to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Premier Chris Minns.

All of them call their brother a hero.

Mudasar Bashir, one of Faraz’s older brothers, said having heard what his brother did from police officers who watched the horrific CCTV of the attack, there was no doubt his efforts were “heroic”.

“(Police told us) we’ve seen the footage, so it was like people were screaming and people were walking towards the exit ... but when we saw Faraz on the CCTV, he ran towards the man who was stabbing the people,” Mudasar said.

“He tried to stop him, he wrestled with him, so we think that from what we have seen he did his very best to stop him.

“But somehow, the man, his knife was very sharp and the man who was doing that, he was very swift, so somehow he managed to stab him (Faraz) so he was stabbed and he fell on the floor.

“But he did a very heroic act and in that matter of time... he saved lots of Australians”.

Andrew Reid

Bystander who performed first aid on victims

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 13, the first day of school holidays, Westfield Bondi Junction was particularly busy.

So busy that as Cauchi ran through levels three, four and five of the shopping centre, thousands had no idea of the horror unfolding.

One of those was Andrew Reid, a veteran lifeguard known to millions around the world as a star of Bondi Rescue. Reid was shopping at Myer when a staff member told him people were being stabbed outside and the building was being evacuated.

As the department store’s shutters were pulled down, he heard gunshots. A lone-female police officer, Inspector Amy Scott, had confronted Cauchi and shot him dead.

“As we looked through the gaps in the shutters … I looked down towards level four … and I could see some police officers sort of running around, and I could see a woman bleeding pretty badly,” Reid said.

When Reid spotted an injured woman his instinct was to help. After running down an internal Myer escalator to a lower level, he asked a security guard to let him out.

Over the next 15 minutes he helped the patients he could, by performing CPR or trying to stop the bleeding. Others could not be saved.

When a dazed and confused Reid eventually walked out of the shopping centre, he received a call from a member of his running group, who was worried their friend had been attacked.

“She said, ‘I think, I think Ash is in there’,” Reid said.

“And I said, ‘Was she with her baby? And she said, ‘Yeah’... that’s when I sort of put two and two together with the pram (I’d seen).”

Ashlee Good, 38, was one of the six victims of Cauchi’s knife rampage, alongside Jade Young, 47, Pikria Darchia, 55, Dawn Singleton, 25, Yixuan Cheng, 27 and Faraz Tahir, 30

Silas Despreaux and Damien Guerot

Heroic ‘bollard men’ who confronted Joel Cauchi

In the days and weeks that followed Cauchi’s attack, many Sydneysiders spoke about the fact it could have been them in Westfield.

For construction workers Silas Despreaux and Damien Guerot, the discussion is not hypothetical.

“Silas was like we need to stop him, so we took the bollard and he was running in front of me and I was running behind Silas with the bollard,” Guerot recalls.

“Silas and me were like screaming to this lady… because she didn’t know what was happening.”

At the moment Guerot came face-to-face with Cauchi on the escalator, Despreaux was standing just behind him urging him to throw the bollard.

When his friend launched the bollard at Cauchi and missed, they themselves had to run for safety, but then bumped into NSW Police Inspector Amy Scott who was the first officer on the scene.

Instantly the pair rejoined the hunt for the attacker, running behind Insp Scott with chairs until they found Cauchi up on level five.

As the hero policewoman fired the fatal shots at Cauchi, they watched on from metres away.

Both men admit there have been “nightmares” in the weeks since, but one positive out of the tragic situation has been that Guerot has now joined Despreaux as a permanent resident of Australia.

“It’s a small positive that out of this horrible situation that Damien got his PR (permanent residency),” Despreaux said.

“In the beginning and for us, our reaction was just like, a simple reaction, you know, we didn’t expect all this to happen after that.

“I go to the gym there at Fitness First, so I went back (to Westfield) maybe two times already and of course, it’s difficult to be there.”

Guerot said the pair had relied on each other to get through the challenging times since.

“At the beginning, of course, we didn’t get so much sleep… (we had) some nightmares and things like this,” he said.

“So (now) we’re just going back to work and trying to get as normal as we can. I think we have been lucky to be together.”

Liya Barko

Survivor

A Saturday visit to Westfield at Bondi Junction is a habit for some.

Liya Barko is not one of those, but on that sunny afternoon as she made her way home from a visit to Bondi Beach, she made what she had hoped would be a quick stop at the shopping centre, simply to buy a volleyball.

Instead, that shop would be life changing.

Ms Barko had just begun to search “sports” on a store directory when a man in her peripheral vision “crossed” quickly towards her before “crashing” into her.

“And when I look on my hand, I remember already a guy in front of me talking to me that I have been stabbed,” Ms Barko said.

“I don’t remember his face because I never like, looked up. I was busy with what was going on so he told me, you have been stabbed, can you walk? And he helped me. we went to another store, and they locked the door.”

Some of Ms Barko’s family have now joined her in Australia to help her with the long road to recovery, as well as setting up a GoFundMe page.

She is very honest when asked how she is doing.

“It depends, some days are better than others. I can wake up in a good mood (and have a) good morning, but also I can have a sad afternoon.

“It depends, it changes fast. It’s not normal, but to realise that someone tried to kill you just because you walked into a shopping (centre), it’s not something easy to process.

“I will need more time to work on what happened, because everything is so new to me.

“But I can walk more than I could walk last week, maybe five to ten minutes more, but I still can’t lift up more than two kilos and I have big scars on my belly, so it will take time.”

Anthony Chambers

St Vincent’s Hospital surgeon on-call April 13

Anthony Chambers was just finishing up a routine surgery when his phone, and the phones of those assisting him, went off inside the operating theatre.

For all the phones to be ringing at once, he knew something big must have happened.

Nine hours later, as a nation grieved and searched for answers, Dr Chambers walked out of surgery having saved two lives.

“Unfortunately we received a patient who had an injury that was not survivable and that patient passed away. Of the other three patients, two of them were very seriously injured... and a fourth patient had a relatively minor injury,” Dr Chambers said.

When he went home that night he went to sleep, not realising the enormity of what had happened until he turned on the TV the next day.

As he sat there watching the news and learning more about those he had treated the day before, Dr Chambers admits it was “challenging”.

“I caught up with the news the next morning and that’s when, I really saw all of the details,” he said.

“And I have to say, it was quite challenging in a lot of ways because you’re seeing the news reporting some personal stories behind some of those patients.

“I live in the eastern suburbs, I actually had a friend that was in Bondi Junction at the time and, you know, when they heard screaming and people running they actually managed to leave Bondi Junction.

“So yeah, this is a very personal story for me.”