Shooter’s mistake,
A quirk of geography saved dozens at Christchurch’s Linwood mosque.
Mohammed Akheel Uddin had just gone inside after his weekly parking duty when he saw a man approach on the opposite side to the main door of the mosque, where about 100 worshippers had just started their Friday prayers.
He was only metres away, but finding no door, he shot outside and at the window. The brief warning was a lifesaver, Uddin said. Seven people died, but the toll could have been so much higher.
‘‘I broke my prayer and I saw from the window three dead bodies there. I said ‘Getting down. Something is happening outside. People get on the floor’. I called the people to get inside the ladies section. It’s a safe place, you can lock it from inside. Then I saw him. He was 6 to 8 feet in front of me.
‘‘By the time he was in the right place we hide ourselves. It was panic. It was a very terrible situation. It was literally the first shot he shoot from the window and he was dead. So when people see that we went here and there and tried to close the doors. That’s why, if he was coming straight away to the main door, everybody would be maybe no more here.’’
Uddin called police to warn the Masjid Al Noor. He didn’t realise they’d already been hit, with the loss of 42 lives.
There, his Indian countryman, Mohammed Afroze, was just inside the front door when a man entered with a big jacket and
camera, a gun and gloves. Afroze was visiting for a week from Ashburton, staying with his old flatmates. ‘‘We are five. When we come outside, there is three. How can I tell? The words are not coming.’’
They had plans. They’d been laughing the day before about how they would probably get married this year. Mojammel Hoq was from Bangladesh. Areeb Syed was from Pakistan.
‘‘Their rooms are waiting for them: watches, computers. Their rooms are waiting for them, but they are no more with us. When I was in there, I can’t stay one second. The rooms were very quiet. Very calm. You can’t go inside. You can’t go inside.’’
At the mosque, the noise came before anything else. They lay down, thinking it was an earthquake. As Afroze realised – slowly, slowly – what was happening, chaos surged around him. He was about the fourth person inside the main door, but bullets seemed to whistle past. ‘‘[The shooter] just started firing everywhere. In front of me was Somali kid, maybe three years old, he shot three or four shots.
‘‘And my friend, his name is Areeb, he was shooted in front of me. All the bullets on his right hand shoulder. He escaped from the same door I escaped from. But then he was lying down. After that I suddenly saw many bodies. Everywhere there’s bodies. People lie down. Blood is coming here. I was trying to escape. People they are going, trying to rush out.
‘‘The bullets are not touching me. From the backside people are coming and they all die. The bodies are pushing me to go outside. I can’t do anything.
‘‘I just try to escape, escape, escape. Because we don’t know what’s going on. The shooting. Small people are dying, small babies, old people. Some people injured want to go out but they can’t. They are still shooting the dead bodies. Some people are alive because the dead bodies are covering them up.
‘‘Every person see the story different, because every person experienced it differently. One incident, but plenty stories.’’
Afroze ran out and stood in front of his friends’ flat, seeing for the first time the blood covering his clothes.
He didn’t have a key but was afraid to ask a stranger for help in case someone thought he was a suspect. He called a friend, who drove him to hospital.
Three days on, Afroze and Uddin remain in shock. Afroze limps from his bandaged toe. He thought he’d been hit, but he was injured in the crush of bodies.
Uddin’s landlord, Linda Armstrong, was also killed. He can’t bring himself to go back to the house. For 40 hours he didn’t sleep or eat.
Muslim mental health teams have been brought in from Auckland to help with the shock. Psychologist Dr Shagufta said families were still holding in their grief. ‘‘They look OK, but they are not OK. The moment they see the bodies, the emotions will fly out. The actual trauma will start after that.’’
More Muslim mental health staff were needed in the city, social worker Sobia Asim said. ‘‘A lot of women have lost their brothers, sons, husbands. They don’t drive, they have no employment. There’s so much that needs to be sorted out.’’
‘‘By the time he was in the right place we hide ourselves. It was panic.’’
Mohammed Akheel Uddin