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Witnesses have described chaotic, confronting and confusing scenes inside Westfield Bondi Junction as multiple people were stabbed before an armed man was killed by police.
Shoppers and employees began to notice something was not right just before 4pm on Saturday, when the first signs of trouble included people running inside the eastern-Sydney centre.
Max Barnsley, who works on the fifth floor, said he initially did not think anything of it.
"But it went on for too long," Mr Barnsley said.
Shops went into lockdown.
"We were just in the back room, on the phone with police, trying to figure out what's going on," he said.
A shopper, Kelly, saw people running and screaming.
She also saw an injured man and woman, and initially thought they had been shot after hearing a gunshot.
"All the shops shut their doors," Kelly said.
"We couldn't get in, they wouldn't let us in. We just ran down the fire escape.
"I thought I was going to die. I thought we were going to be shot and killed. We thought he had a gun. We didn't know it was a knife."
Many witnesses sheltered inside locked businesses.
One witness, who asked not to be identified, said he was near the Country Road store when he saw a man in a green shirt start stabbing others "indiscriminately".
"[We just heard] screaming, screaming and it didn't seem that long before we heard 'boom boom boom' of the gunshot and we thought, 'We hope it's the police,'" the witness told the ABC.
"[A person] is dying 10 metres away … I grabbed towels and there were three people dying around me.
"It was just carnage."
Vernon Michael said he had been at Sourdough Bakery where a woman was stabbed.
Then came yelled instructions to "run".
He said minutes later, he saw a man armed with a large knife on an escalator.
"Just really calmly, he was walking like he was just having an ice cream in the park," Mr Michael said.
Within a minute, he said he heard three gunshots.
An evacuation followed, as dozens of ambulances waited in streets outside.
Brendan Blomeley, who was in the centre with his 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, fled the centre with "thousands of others".
"It was harrowing," he said.
"We were in the store with tonnes of other people but the police were brilliant and the response rate was excellent."
NSW Police said the armed man was confronted by a senior officer and shot dead.
Many who were not inside the centre endured anxious waits to find out whether their loved ones were safe.
Others have now headed to hospitals, including St Vincent's, where the injured are being treated.
Outside the hospital, Isaac Weinberg said his wife Yvonne was one of those who was stabbed.
"We didn't know what had happened. They said [she was] stabbed in the top-right corner of her back.
"She thought she got punched and then she touched herself and there was blood.
"Apart from that she's OK. She's alive and that's all that matters."
Senior police have said they believe the man acted alone.
They say they have so far not discovered anything at the scene to indicate his motive or ideology.