Some of the country’s far-right ­nationalists, including Australia’s controversial Russian Cossack, Simeon Boikov, have been members and supporters of the gun club attended by the alleged Bondi Beach terrorists Sajid and Naveed Akram who brutally gunned down Jews celebrating Hanukkah.

Police continue to investigate the Akrams’ gun membership and the training they received, and have questioned officials from the Zastava Hunting Association in western Sydney, which provided gun training for Naveed, 22, over a period of about five years.

They are also looking at other people in the club who may have had contact with the Akrams. Some club members have been on the radar of authorities for years.

As well as being enthusiastically pictured with guns, Zastava officials and the Zastava logo, Mr Boikov was once seen holding a flag promoting Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organisation in Lebanon driven by anti-Semitic ideology, and has been the subject of a NSW police Firearms Prohibition Order since September 2021.

Mr Boikov has been inside the Russian consulate in Sydney seeking asylum for the past three years following an ­alleged assault on an elderly pro-Ukraine man and fears police may detain him for foreign interference.

He said that if any members of the gun club knew what the Akrams were planning, they would have headed down to Bondi Beach and “shot back at the terrorists”.

Mr Boikov and other Australian-based Cossacks have long been keen supporters of the Zastava Hunting Association, believed to have formed about 2013.

Mr Boikov was pictured about 10 years ago with the founding member of Zastava, Milan Kalanj.

Mr Boikov, ataman of the Russian Zabaikal Cossack Association in Australia, said he had never met the Akrams at the hunting club, based in ­Bonnyrigg, which organises hunting events in the Victorian and NSW countryside.

The hunting club was borne out of the Serbian Chetnik nationalist migrants loyal to the WWII Yugoslav royalist Draza Mihailovic.

Another keen Zastava Hunting Association member is a Boikov associate, cossack Artem “Tom” Kozmin who has been photographed wearing a t-shirt of Vladimir Putin and “from Russia with Love’’ at the hunting association’s annual festival at the Serbian ­Orthodox Church’s premises in Rossmore, in southwest Sydney.

He was also pictured holding a Hezbollah flag, but distanced himself from the terrorist group, saying “f..k them”.

“I am a supporter of Russia, because I am Russian,” he said.

He said it was a surprise to him when he learnt following the attack that there were Muslims at the Zastava gun club.

Mr Kozmin, in his Cossack uniform, was pictured in 2015 in the war-ravaged Donbas region alongside Russian militia leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic, including Sergey Dubinsky and Leonid Kharchenko, the two men found guilty in a Dutch court of downing Malaysia Airlines MH17 in July 2014, killing all 298 people on board. Oleg Pulatov, who was acquitted of the MH17 murder charges, was also pictured.

Mr Boikov was pictured meeting the third person found guilty of the MH17 passengers and crew’s murders, Igor Girkin.

Mr Kozmin and Mr Boikov have previously undergone training with the Russian military GRU in Zasopka, near Siberia, alongside other Australians, photographs show.