The Assailants
The attackers were both former camel-drivers working at Broken Hill. They were Badsha Mahommed Gool (born c. 1874), an ice-cream vendor, and Mullah Abdullah (born c. 1854), a local imam and halal butcher.
Gool's ice-cream cart was well known in town and was used to transport the men to the attack site. They also fashioned a home-made Ottoman flag which they flew. There appears to have been little effort made at hiding their identities.
Abdullah had arrived in Broken Hill around 1898 and worked as a camel driver, before becoming a mullah and slaughtering animals according to halal Islamic rites. Several days before the killings Adbullah was convicted by Chief Sanitary Inspector Brosnan for slaughtering sheep on premises not licensed for slaughtering. It was not his first charge. Considering the slaughter-house regulators believed that the halal method of slaughter was inhumane, there was little scope for Abdullah to legally prepare such meat for the Muslim community. In addition, he had ceased wearing his turban years before, "since the day some larrikin threw stones at me, and I did not like it".
Gool lived next door to Mullah Adbullah. Gool was a member of the Afridi, a Pashtun clan, from Afghanistan. He claimed he had been in the Turkish Army several times and was believed to regularly smoke strong marijuana. Police Constable Mills later conjectured that Gool had used Abdullah's concerns over the fine as leverage to convince him to take part in the killings.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Broken Hill