A 28-YEAR-OLD AUSTRALIAN OUT TO AVENGE ATTACKS ON EUROPE.
Manifesto filled with rants about race, identity
Clutched tightly by his adoring father, the fair-haired, blue-eyed toddler was the picture of innocence.
It was, his mother said, one of her fondest memories — the family together on holiday in Hawaii.
The young Brenton Tarrant had just celebrated his birthday and would go on to enjoy a normal upbringing in the rural Australian town of Grafton, New South Wales, alongside his father, Rodney, mother and sister. Little, if anything, pointed toward the horror that he would go on to unleash.
Indeed, he describes himself as an “ordinary white man,” born into a working class, low-income family of Scottish, Irish and English descent.
By all accounts, his life was unremarkable, leaving school to become a fitness instructor at a local gym.
In 2010, his father died of an asbestos-related cancer and shortly afterwards, having acquired an inheritance, Tarrant left the family home to travel the world.
During the years he was away, his mother, an English teacher, wrote online about how much she missed her “incredible son,” although she said she “understood his wanderlust.”
She wrote fondly of her “Brento” and appeared blissfully unaware of how his world had turned.
Tarrant’s travels took him through much of Europe, North Korea, India and Japan.
A senior Turkish official said Tarrant travelled to Turkey multiple times and spent what the official called an “extended period of time in the country.”
The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with Turkish government rules. The official said an investigation is underway of “the suspect’s movements and contacts within the country.”
He did not say when he travelled to Turkey.
Last year, Tarrant described Pakistan as “an incredible place filled with the most earnest, kind-hearted and hospitable people in the world.”
At some point during this journey, something in the 28-year-old changed and the roots of his violent rampage began to take hold.
He is thought to have become obsessed with the terrorist attacks that took place in Europe in 2016 and 2017, specifically referencing the death of an 11-year-old Swedish girl, one of five people killed in a terror attack in Stockholm in 2017, in the rambling so-called “manifesto” he published online.
He wrote that the girl’s death enraged him and that his desire for violence grew when he arrived in France and noted all the immigrants in the cities and towns he visited.
And so he began to plot his attack. Three months ago, he started planning to target Christchurch. He claimed not to be a direct member of any organization or group, though he said he has donated to many nationalist groups. He also claimed he contacted an anti-immigration group called the reborn Knights Templar and got the blessing of Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.
However, Oystein Storrvik,
Breivik’s lawyer, told a Norwegian newspaper that his client has had “very limited contacts with the surrounding world, so it seems very unlikely that he has had contact.”
In his 17,000-word manifesto, Tarrant describes his native country as a lacklustre, apathetic offshoot of Britain.
“The origins of my language is European, my culture is European, my political beliefs are European, my philosophical beliefs are European, my identity is European and, most importantly, my blood is European,” he writes. “What is an Australian but a drunk European? Kidding, but Australia is a European colony, particularly of British stock and thereby an extension of Europe.”
He declares himself to be pro-Brexit and admits to being a fascist, saying he feels an affinity with Oswald Mosley, the disgraced U.K. politician who became the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
Yet he goes on to compare himself to Nelson Mandela and state that he expects to win the Nobel Peace prize.
He says he is racist but not a xenophobe and declares support for Donald Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”
China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values, he says, and he has contempt for the wealthiest one per cent. He singled out U.S. conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most.
In a tweet, Owens responded by saying that if the media portrayed her as the inspiration for the attack, it had better hire lawyers.
The hate-filled language could not be further from the apparent beliefs of his own mother, whose Facebook page is awash with calls for equality and posts about spirituality and the importance of love and friendship.
At one point, Tarrant’s mother, who collects healing crystals, denounces the “delusional” people “causing death and destruction on this great globe.”
In 2013, she posted part of a message from her son who had been regaling her with tales from his trip to New Zealand: “Brenton’s last update in New Zealand was magic,” she wrote, before republishing his email full of detail about his travels in a country he described as “truly paradise.”
There was little to predict that barely five years later, he would be plotting an atrocity of unimaginable magnitude on that very soil.
HE DECLARED SUPPORT FOR TRUMP ‘AS A SYMBOL OF RENEWED WHITE IDENTITY.’