December 19, 2025
MANILA – The hotel where father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram had stayed for a month here before they flew to Bondi Beach and killed 15 people is just a walking distance away from city hall, a police station, and the Camp Domingo Leonor police headquarters.
Before they flew to Australia and killed 15 people during the Jewish Hanukkah festival, the father and son stayed at an obscure GV Hotel on Magallanes St. here, where they occupied room 315 on the third floor, hotel staff member Jenelyn Sayson told the Inquirer.
Sayson said that they could not have gone out of Davao City for the entire duration of their stay, as they only left their hotel room for one or two hours at a time before they came back.
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They were always in their room for the whole 27 days since their first booking on November 1, she said.
“The longest that they left the hotel was between one and two hours,” she said.
“Whenever they go outside, the father was always using his sunglasses,” Sayson said. She described the son as “big-built, fair-skinned and has a mole.”
“From the time they arrived until they checked out, they never left the city because we saw them going in and out of the hotel every day.”
Sayson said that on Tuesday, Dec. 16, officers from the Task Force Davao arrived at the hotel and asked if the two suspects had checked in at the hotel. Sayson said she confirmed it since she recognized the two from the photos shown by the officers.
But the hotel could no longer turn over the closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage to the officers since their recording capacity could only last a week.
Instead, the military officers took their computer’s hard drive.
Sayson said that in the hotel log, Naveed used the mobile number 09874563211.
They paid four times for their hotel stay: the first when they booked online for the November 1 stay and extended their stay three times until November 28.