KNIFE ATTACK IN NEW ZEALAND.
MAN WAS ON WATCH LIST AND UNDER POLICE SURVEILLANCE
New Zealand's anti-terrorism laws failed Friday after a known Islamic State supporter under constant police watch went on the rampage with a knife at a supermarket, Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, admitted.
A 32-year-old Sri Lankan wounded six people with a blade wrenched from a shop display, before being shot dead less than a minute into the attack by plainclothes police who were following him.
Friday night, as three critically injured victims were fighting for their lives in hospital, questions were being asked as to why a man already classed as a dangerous terror suspect had been free to walk the streets.
The man — so far identified only as “S” because of court orders imposed on him for past terror offences — had been on a terror watch list since 2016 after posting extremist content online. He has lived in New Zealand for 10 years.
He was sentenced in July to a year of community supervision, after the courts ruled that he had not committed any offence serious enough to be locked up.
Denouncing the “hateful” assault, Ardern said: “The fact that he was in the community will be an illustration that we haven't succeeded in using the law to the extent we would have liked.”
The attack happened Friday afternoon at the Countdown supermarket in the Auckland suburb of New Lynn, where police had followed the suspect on what they presumed was one of his routine shopping trips.
Witnesses said he then grabbed a knife from a display and began lashing out “like a lunatic” at customers.
“I was just buying stuff and walking toward the milk aisle and then suddenly I heard a person shouting loudly `Allahu akbar' and just running,” one 34-year-old man told the New Zealand Herald.
“He had a knife, a pretty big knife. It was very scary ... It was four or five steps away from me, and I had a clear path to run so I ran.
“I could see one lady wearing a white T-shirt completely bleeding and really panicking. I saw another person bleeding from the shoulder really bad.”
After hearing the commotion, police rushed to the scene and fired at least 10 times as the attacker charged at them. Witnesses spoke of seeing victims on the floor, and that a woman and an elderly man were among those hurt.
“He went past us by the aisle. This undercover cop came to me ... I was going to hit him ... The cop is like `get back' and he started shooting him, five times and killed him,” said Amit Nand told the Newshub News Service. “(One woman's) head was pushed on the food so I had to put something on it because she didn't want to get up. I gave her something for her head. She was stabbed in her head and her stomach.
New Zealand has been on terror alert since a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.
Ardern said: “What happened today was despicable, it was hateful, it was wrong,” she said. “It was carried out by an individual, not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity.”
Ardern won international praise for her compassionate response to the shootings, but the supermarket violence is likely to lead to questions about why the attacker was allowed to remain free if the authorities deemed him dangerous enough to warrant constant observation. Ardern said that because of court orders in place, further details of the attacker's identity and past criminal history could not yet be revealed.
However, according to the Herald, he was first arrested in 2016, after posting online statements supporting ISIL attacks in Brussels. Despite warnings from police, he continued to make online threats, including ranting against “Kiwi scum.”
Andrew Coster, the police commissioner, said: “The reality is that when you're surveilling someone on a 24-7 basis, it's not possible to be immediately next to them at all times.”