On 11 February 2026, Jacob Carswell-Doherty sent the following email to Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop, the ABC Investigations reporter responsible for the Four Corners episode Bondi: Path to Terror, which aired on 9 February 2026. The episode was the ABC's flagship investigation into the Bondi Beach massacre. What follows is the email in full, followed by the ABC's response.
Dear Mr Rubinsztein-Dunlop,
I write in relation to the Four Corners episode Bondi: Path to Terror, which aired on 9 February 2026.
Ten months, the full resources of the ABC, and you produced a repackaged episode and a school friend who called Naveed Akram 'quiet.'
In late December 2025, I published a two-part investigation on LinkedIn titled "Peripheral Figure," in which I traced the network that radicalised Naveed Akram, the systemic failures that allowed that network to operate, and the facilitation chain that may have connected a converted warehouse in Bankstown to a bomb maker in Mindanao. I relied solely on open-source material: court judgments, Senate Estimates transcripts, published research, and news reporting, including your own April 2025 episode.
I had hoped that a program with the reach, resources, and compulsory production powers available to Four Corners would advance the public understanding of these events well beyond what I was able to assemble using Google. Having reviewed the episode and its transcript, I am disappointed.
The substance of Path to Terror is drawn from your April 2025 broadcast, The Agent Inside. The Marcus interviews, the Street Dawah footage, the Al Madina Dawah Centre material, Wisam Haddad's network, the El Matari cell, the ASIO resourcing narrative, and Marcus's warnings about youth indoctrination were all canvassed in that earlier episode. Your own narration acknowledged as much: "as we reported last year."
The new material amounts to a school friend of Naveed Akram who described him as "quiet," an interview with the NSW Premier who conceded "something went badly wrong," and a formal statement from ASIO. Ten months passed between the two episodes. The result was not a deeper investigation but a reframing of existing material around the Royal Commission.
There were leads sitting in the public domain that warranted serious examination. None required classified intelligence. All were discoverable through court records, published reporting, and basic research. None were pursued.
1. The Philippines connection and Solaiman
Your episode noted that the Akrams travelled to Mindanao, described it as a "former Islamic State hotspot," and reported that police were "still trying to determine what they were doing there." That is where the episode stopped.
What it did not explore: Mohammad Usman Solaiman, Dawlah Islamiyah's master bomb maker, was operating in the same region during the same period. On 7 December 2025, Philippine forces killed him. One week later, the Akrams attacked Bondi with five devices assessed as viable but which failed to detonate. The proximity between the death of a senior bomb maker and an attack involving IEDs that were functional in design but flawed in execution is not a thread that requires classified intelligence to identify. It required a search engine.
Your episode presented the Philippines trip as an unanswered question. It was a lead that could have been followed.
2. The flight date change
The Akrams originally booked flights for 14–15 November. They changed the booking to 1 November. On the dates they were originally supposed to land, Philippine forces killed Najib Laguindab, alias Abu Jihad, a sub-leader of the Dawlah Islamiyah-Maute Group and one of the region's most wanted. Either the Akrams had foreknowledge that the situation in Mindanao was deteriorating—intelligence that could only come from network contacts—or the coincidence is extraordinary.
This raises a direct question: who told them to change the dates? Your episode did not mention the booking change, Laguindab, or the timing.
3. Uweinat's renunciation before Bellew J
Your episode noted that Uweinat was an ISIS recruiter convicted for indoctrinating teenagers, and that after his release he was photographed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving a jihadist flag. What it did not mention was that in September 2021, Uweinat stood before Justice Geoffrey Bellew in the NSW Supreme Court and declared under oath:
"I have completely renounced my membership of IS and any other terrorist organisation."
A prison chaplain testified he "was no longer a religious extremist and posed no risk to society." Justice Bellew found him "genuinely contrite" but noted an expert's opinion that his beliefs "could re-emerge" if he was "reunited with his former network."
Within weeks of release, he was back at Haddad's centre. By August 2025, he was on the Harbour Bridge waving the black flag. The gap between that sworn renunciation and his subsequent conduct goes directly to the efficacy of the justice system's response to convicted terrorists. It is a matter of public record. It was not raised.
4. The facilitation chain
Your episode treated El Matari, Uweinat, and Haddad as background figures in Akram's radicalisation. What it did not do was connect the documented evidence into the chain it forms.
El Matari wrote letters from Supermax that reached Uweinat in prison, circumventing the approved association list and addressed to Uweinat's jihadi name, Abu Musa al-Maqdisi. El Matari also wrote to Joseph Saadieh, on whose devices police found 26 explosive-related files that JCTT experts confirmed were "generally viable." Working bomb recipes, connected to El Matari, four years before Bondi. Your episode did not mention Saadieh at all.
After release, Uweinat distributed Philippines-specific ISIS content, including "Inside the Khilafah" featuring operations in Mindanao. Dakkak's control order explicitly banned Philippine contacts. The network had documented connections to the region—connections the courts recognised as serious enough to prohibit. The Akrams then travelled to that same region.
Either the Akrams independently discovered and arranged contact with ISIS-linked figures in Mindanao, or someone from the network made the introduction.
5. The CDO failures
Continuing detention orders were used zero times under Attorney-General Dreyfus. The supervision application for Uweinat was filed six days before his release—virtually guaranteeing failure. Senator Michaelia Cash raised this pattern at Senate Estimates in February 2024, ten months before Bondi, naming Uweinat, Cerantonio, Benbrika, and Al Maouie. Your episode touched on Uweinat's release but did not interrogate the systemic failure of Australia's strongest post-sentence counter-terrorism tool.
6. Haddad as a potential intelligence asset
On 23 December 2025, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Haddad was "a good intel source." If accurate, this suggests a calculation was made: that his intelligence value outweighed his danger as a radicaliser. Your episode noted that Haddad was never charged. It did not ask why—or explore whether protecting an asset may have enabled the infrastructure that facilitated a massacre.
7. The VERA-2R suppression
The risk assessment tool used for post-sentence terrorism orders—VERA-2R—was found by a government report to have predictive validity no better than chance. Home Affairs Minister Dutton buried the report. For three years, government lawyers used the tool in court while knowing it could not predict risk. Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth called the suppression "a disgrace" and "serious interference with the administration of justice." Your episode discussed the inadequacy of post-release monitoring without identifying the tool at the centre of it, or the fact that the government knew it did not work.
8. ASIO
Finally, your episode also accepted a comfortable framing: that ASIO's failures were a product of budget constraints and resource reallocation. Burgess came from 18 years at the Australian Signals Directorate—signals intelligence, cyber operations, the quantifiable. He pivoted ASIO toward what he knew: foreign interference, state-based threats, espionage. The slower, harder work of human intelligence—watching a preacher radicalise teenagers, understanding that ideology can lie dormant for years then activate—was deprioritised. Your episode let Marcus make the point that experienced officers were replaced with "new graduates" who did not know the names of ISIS leaders, and then moved on. It did not interrogate the institutional choice behind the reshuffle: a Director-General reshaping an agency in his own image, away from the mission that had defined it since 2014. And it did not confront the deeper failure. The problem was not that the system lacked resources.
Framing Bondi as a resourcing failure obscures the decisions that were actually made—and the individuals who made them.
The broader point
Fifteen people were killed at Bondi. Forty were injured. The victims, their families, and the Australian public deserve an investigation that pushes further than what a solicitor with a laptop can piece together from court judgments and Google in his spare time.
Every thread I have identified was discoverable through open-source research. Court transcripts. Senate Estimates. Published academic research. News reporting. Philippine military press releases. None of it was hidden. A program with the investigative resources, institutional access, and ten months of lead time that Four Corners had should have found all of it—and more.
Instead, the public received a repackaged episode dressed in a new title, built around a school friend, a known informant whose credibility ASIO disputes, and a state premier conceding the obvious. The victims of Bondi deserved better.
Kind regards,
Jacob Carswell-Doherty
Principal, Jake McKinley
The ABC's response
Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop, the ABC Investigations reporter, replied the following morning:
"Hi Jacob, thanks for your email. Always appreciate feedback, even negative, particularly when it's considered, as yours is. I'm interested in some of your points and will send you a proper reply when I'm back on deck. Trying to take a few days off this week after the seven week slog." — Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop, ABC Investigations, 11 February 2026
No further reply has been received.