Mourners pay tribute to victims of New Zealand shootings
A steady stream of mourners paid tribute Sunday at a makeshift memorial to the 50 people slain by a gunman at two mosques in Christchurch, while dozens of Muslims stood by to bury the dead when authorities finally release the victims’ bodies.
Hundreds of flowers were piled up amid candles, balloons and notes of grief and love outside the Al-noor mosque. As a light rain fell, people clutched each other and wept quietly, AP wrote.
“We wish we knew your name to write upon your heart. We wish we knew your favorite song, what makes you smile, what makes you cry,” read one of the tributes, which contained cutout paper hearts under a nearby tree. “We made a heart for you. 50 hearts for 50 lives.”
Two days after Friday’s attack, New Zealand’s deadliest shooting in modern history, relatives were still waiting for authorities to release the bodies. Islamic law calls for bodies to be cleansed and buried as soon as possible after death, usually within 24 hours.
Supporters arrived from across the country to help with the burials in Christchurch and authorities sent in backhoes to dig graves in a site that was newly fenced off and blocked from view with white netting.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said authorities hoped to release all the bodies by Wednesday, and Police Commissioner Mike Bush said authorities were working with pathologists and coroners to complete the task as soon as they could.
Police said they had released a preliminary list of the victims to families, which has helped give closure to some who were waiting for any news.
The suspect in the shootings, 28-year-old white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, appeared in court Saturday amid strict security, shackled and wearing all-white prison garb, and showed no emotion when the judge read one murder charge and said more would likely follow.
Tarrant had posted a jumbled 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto online before the attacks and apparently used a helmet-mounted camera to broadcast live video of the slaughter.
Ardern said the gunman had sent the manifesto to her office email about nine minutes before the attacks, although she hadn’t gotten the email directly herself. She said her office was one of about 30 recipients and had forwarded the email to parliamentary security within a couple of minutes of receiving it.
Bush said at a news conference that another body had been found at Al-noor mosque as they finished removing the victims, bringing the number of people killed there to 42. Another seven people were killed at Linwood mosque and one more person died later at Christchurch Hospital.
Thirty-four wounded remained at the hospital, where officials said 12 were in critical condition. A 4-year-old girl at a children’s hospital in Auckland was also listed as critical. Dozens of Muslim supporters gathered at a center set up for victims, families and friends across the road from the hospital, where many had flown in from around New Zealand to offer support. About two dozen men received instructions on their duties Sunday, which included Muslim burial customs.
People across the country were still trying to come to terms with the massacre that Ardern described as “one of New Zealand’s darkest days.”
The gunman livestreamed 17 minutes of the rampage at the Alnoor mosque, where he sprayed worshippers with bullets. Facebook, Twitter and Google scrambled to take down the video, which was widely available on social media for hours after the bloodbath.
The second attack took place at the Linwood mosque about 5 kilometers (3 miles) away.
“The alternative if Parliament cannot agree the deal by that time is much worse”, she said, with Britain likely having to take part in European elections in May if there was a longer extension.
“The idea of the British people going to the polls to elect MEPS three years after voting to leave the EU hardly bears thinking about.
“There could be no more potent symbol of Parliament’s collective political failure,” she wrote.
May warned that if MPS failed to back her deal before the European Council summit, “we will not leave the EU for many months, if ever”.
The prime minister struck her agreement with the EU in November after nearly two years of tortuous talks following the June 2016 referendum to leave the bloc.
But the deal has remained deadlocked in parliament, chiefly by disagreement over the so-called Irish “backstop” – a measure to avoid barriers at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Lawmakers voted against the deal for a second time on Tuesday but then voted against leaving the EU without a deal on Wednesday.
MPS also rejected a call to hold a second Brexit referendum -- a blow to the hopes of a large number of Britons who still dream of keeping their European identity.
May needs to win over rebel Brexiteers in her own party and Northern Ireland’s hardline Democratic Unionist Party which props up her government.
Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Sunday his party is against May’s deal — but indicated that it would back an amendment that supports the deal on condition it is put to a new referendum.
AFP and AP contributed to this story.