PM mourns with families five years after attack at mosques
Years before the March 15 attacks, the terrorist went on numerous racist online tirades, some of which have only recently come to light.
Survivors, witnesses, politicians and family members of those lost in the Christchurch terror attacks gathered at Masjid An-Nur in the city yesterday evening to mark the fifth anniversary of the shootings.
On March 15, 2019, a terrorist opened fire on worshippers at the Al Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre, killing 51 people and injuring dozens more.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon – visiting Christchurch for a series of engagements – was among those paying their respects at the mosque.
He sat beside Judith Collins MP, the lead co-ordination minister for the Government’s response to the Royal Commission’s report into the terror attacks.
Space was scarce as those paying their respects removed their shoes and entered the mosque.
Speakers included three children, who opened the ceremony reciting verse from the Quran.
The chairperson of the 15 March Trust, Maha Galal, thanked those in attendance for showing their support. “I know it is not easy for all of us to be here.. but it does mean a lot for the March families who have the Shuhada. Nothing can bring back those we lost five years ago because of someone motivated by hatred.
“While we have made progress over the past five years, individually and collectively, we recognise there is much work ahead.”
Former prime minister Chris Hipkins, former Labour leader Andrew Little and Mr Luxon’s coalition partner David Seymour MP also gathered at the mosque to reflect alongside members of the Muslim community and local officials, including Christchurch mayor Phil Mauger.
In the final formal speech of the evening, Christopher Luxon extended his sympathies to the victims’ families.
“I would like to acknowledge the pain that you have endured, but also the strength that you have shown in these past five years.
“The March 15 terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques was a national tragedy and it was an attack on all of us.
“We lost neighbours, we lost friends, schoolmates and colleagues.”
The anniversary concluded with a breaking of fast for Ramadan, the Muslim community’s holiest month.
This year’s anniversary is the first to fall on both a Friday – the day the attacks took place – and during Ramadan.
Speaking earlier yesterday at Christchurch’s justice precinct, the prime minister said he had not spoken to the Muslim community about restorative justice or the possibility of compensation for victims of the terror attacks.
Luxon told reporters that introducing hate speech legislation “is not high on our agenda”.
“As you saw with the previous administration, they had a majority and struggled … if the previous administration couldn’t do it, that’s difficult for us to move forward. But hate reassurance is very important.”
Asked about ACC payments for widows of the attacks – which expired yesterday – Luxon diverted to ACC Minister Matt Doocey, who confirmed the Government would look at each case specifically using a case management team through a number of departments.
The prime minister said the Government was committed to rewriting the Arms Act, which he referred to as an “outdated” piece of legislation. “We have said there will be no new guns added into New Zealand.”
He would, however, not confirm if the Government was committed to adopting a new national security agency as recommended by the Royal Commission of Inquiry.
Five years on from the terror attack, the 44 recommendations made by the Royal Commission of Inquiry remain unfinished, including creating a national security agency to oversee the counter-terror and security effort, reviewing counter-terror laws, and progressing discussions about “restorative justice”.
“[It] was a national tragedy and it was an attack on all of us.”
Christopher Luxon
Prime Minister
Warning: This story contains distressing content, including racist and violent statements. It may be particularly distressing to survivors of March 15. The Press is publishing these comments to reveal the extent of the vitriol directed at the Muslim community by a person who went undetected before committing terrorism.
Aracist lives in a barren Dunedin flat, tucked away in a gloomy valley often shaded by darkness. His world is empty. There is a frayed bed in the living room; a washing basket, a fan. A dartboard dangles on a door, backed with a stray piece of cardboard protecting the wood.
For years the man had travelled voraciously, exploring vast landscapes; waterfalls in Iceland, the African savannah, snow-clad shrines in Japan. He took beautiful photos. They rarely featured people.
While his exterior world was expansive, his interior life – glimpses of which he expressed vividly online – was small and dark, much like the home he eventually chose to live in.
The terrorist who martyred 51 Muslims in Christchurch on March 15, 2019, did not crawl fully formed from the ether. He followed a trajectory - one that started with occasional acts of racism in high school, moved to vivid and disturbing online threats, and ended with a devastating terrorist attack.
Details of that trajectory have taken years to fill out. The man had a sprawling internet presence, some of it easier to find than others.
Last month, a research group at the University of Auckland made a significant addition: It published an analysis of anonymous 4Chan posts it believes were made by the terrorist.
The posts raise new questions about when and how he was radicalised and add to the picture of potential intelligence failings both here and in Australia. Even as the man warned of specific and extreme violence, he offered identifying details, including his nationality, hometown, and source of income.
These posts were not identified by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attacks, which painstakingly detailed his life and preparations.
By comparing his online rhetoric with his real-world actions, we can trace a nascent terrorist who went undetected for years, despite his lapses in operational security. It reveals someone drowning in a seemingly bottomless well of racism, who felt no compunction about sharing his views in online spaces he felt were safe.
“The people he was speaking to online, this was his community,” said Dr Chris Wilson, director of the Master of Conflict and Terrorism Studies course at the University of Auckland, who led the research group that examined the 4Chan posts.
“It was there that his ideas were formed, developed – where he received validation, and encouragement, where he became annoyed ... In terms of the study of radicalisation and violent extremism, it’s, to my mind, incredibly important information.”
The traveller
A gun club in rural Otago receives an unexpected email from Croatia.
A man wanted to know if the club was still open, and if so, could he join? Sure, the club said.
“That’s great news,” the man wrote back. “Hopefully will drop in sometime in August…”
The Royal Commission would later call this the “first tangible indication of his mobilisation to violence”. The man had not shown any previous interest in firearms; his curiosity was presumably related to their future use in a terrorist attack.
Newly discovered online comments by the man around this time give context to his state of mind.
4Chan posts are anonymous by default, but contain the date, time, and country from which they are sent. Because the man travelled extensively – he visited more than 50 countries in a few years – it is possible to track some of his posts, in combination with distinctive grammatical tics and his own disclosure of personal details.
Six days before emailing the gun club, the man had launched into an incoherent and disturbing rant on 4Chan.
He wanted to fund an army of white people to undertake an “ethnic cleansing” in Eastern Europe, he said, and wanted to “kill as many of you as possible”, referring to Muslims. He expressed fantasies about shooting children in the back of the head and raping another poster’s sister.
In multiple posts, he said he was Australian, and there was nothing the Australian Government could do to stop him.
“You are finished” he said to one fellow poster, who said they were Muslim. “Say one last prayer in your f***ing mosque before you are squashed like the roach you are.”
Even for the /pol/ (politically incorrect) board on 4Chan, the posts were unusually extreme. And they were not the first.
About 18 months earlier, the man was travelling in Kyrgyzstan, days after Dylann Roof, a neo-Nazi in the US, killed 9 Black worshippers at a church. The man logged on to 4Chan to say he had no sympathy for the victims, who were “in the wrong country perpetuating the destruction of the white race”. Roof, he said, should have targeted a preschool instead.
These violent, racist posts show the man harboured racist and extreme views at least four years before the attack. It contradicts the generally accepted timeline: that various world events in 2017, including a terrorist attack in Sweden and the electoral loss of far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, had motivated his hatred.
“By 2015, he was extremely violent, and he seemed to be talking about the type of action that he then went on and committed in March 2019,” Wilson said.
“He believed in violence, and he believed in violence against innocent civilians – he didn’t have any moral qualms about that. That was all in place by 2015.”
Southern man
It wasn’t obvious why the man would move to Dunedin.
He had little connection to New Zealand – he had visited with his family as a child, and again to visit a gaming friend in 2013 – but held no particular link to the country.
He later explained that he liked Dunedin’s architecture, its Scottish heritage, and its ethnic composition. But in reality, he probably liked New Zealand’s gun laws.
To stay under the radar, he needed legal access to high-powered firearms. He applied for a gun licence 15 days after he arrived, in September 2017.
Failures in that regard are well documented. The law required a New Zealand-based referee who was a near relative, which the man could not provide.
Instead, the police accepted a Waikato-based gaming friend – whom he had only met in person twice – as a substitute. The other referee was that friend’s parent. Neither said anything negative about the man, even though his friend knew he was racist and Islamophobic.
Between early September and late November, when the application was being processed, the man was building an online trail documenting his beliefs.
Between September 15 and September 20, he made seven separate donations to neo-Nazi and far right groups. They included the far-right European paramilitary wing Generation Identity, and an internet radio network called The Right Stuff, which promoted Holocaust denial and hatred of multiculturalism.
He also joined a far-right Australian Facebook group using the pseudonym “Barry Harry Tarry”, a play on his name using the same initials. He would become a regular contributor to the group. The profile listed his location as Dunedin. Then came a major red flag.
On October 17, he set up a Trademe account with the username “kiwi14words”, a reference to the neo-Nazi phrase “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” It apparently went unnoticed, even as he bought and sold firearms using that account.
The man got his licence. No-one clocked his beliefs, let alone how they might manifest once he had legal access to weapons.
Within a month, he owned seven guns, around 6000 rounds of ammunition, and had done his first shoot at the rifle club.
The planning stage
While in the real world he stashed highpowered weapons, in his digital life, the man was continuing his racist tirades.
In early February, on the far-right Facebook group he contributed to, the man bemoaned the “Islamic boarding school” across the road from his gym (a reference to An-Nur, a childcare centre across the road from Anytime Fitness in South Dunedin, where he worked out).
Around the same time, he posted in the same group: "What I am saying is that we can't be a violent group, not now. But without violence I am not certain if there will be any victory possible at all,“in reference to immigration.
There were also real-world warning signs.
The man had gone to a doctor with abdominal pain and admitted he injected testosterone; the doctor later said he was abusing steroids at “dangerous” levels.
This was significant, in hindsight. The man idolised a Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, and had used his manifesto as a training manual. The Norwegian, too, was a lonely neoNazi who collected firearms and abused steroids. As would become clear later on, the pieces were there. They just hadn’t been assembled.
The man resumed his anonymous posts on 4Chan. In one, he again referenced an “Islamic boarding school” in Dunedin. “This place is doomed”, he said, about New Zealand. In another, he said white people were “in a war for survival”.
He also made a chilling, specific threat. A 4Chan user bemoaned the number of “blacks” in Dunedin: “[D]on't worry lad, I have a plan to stop it,” the man replied. “Just hold on.”
By now, he was actively planning. He had written notes to himself, including a budget for his preparations. He was buying and selling firearms on Trademe and a Hunting and Fishing forum. He was visiting the rifle club around once a week, shooting standing up and emptying his magazine quickly, unusual behaviour some people noticed but did not report.
One day, he was cleaning one of his guns at home and it discharged into his face. He didn’t want medical attention; he worried someone might connect the dots. He went to the hospital anyway, playing out scenarios in his head, rehearsing what he would say to the police.
He needn’t have worried. No law requires reporting self-inflicted gun injuries. No one knew about his extreme political beliefs or his violent online fantasies.
His unusual shooting style was overlooked.
Life went on. Five days later, he wrote a to-do list for his attack, including “research on mosques”. He made more 4Chan posts, including specific references to mosques in the South Island; when one user posted a picture of a matchbox, the man responded, “Soon.”
He took a break. With money running out, he went on one last international trip. In Pakistan, a tour guide took a photo of the man. He was taking photos of the beautiful landscape. By then, he was fully committed to the attack.
March 15
Upon returning to New Zealand from his final holiday, the man finished his planning.
One summer’s day, he drove up to Christchurch, and parked his 2005 Subaru Outback beside Hagley Park. He launched his drone on a pleasant afternoon and flew it above the Masjid Al Noor; the park was busy, and someone noticed, but only reported it after the attack.
The final stretch. In his dark and lonely flat, he wrote his “manifesto”, a thin, errorstrewn digital pamphlet. He scrawled words on his firearms and put petrol canisters in his car. As he had implied online, he wanted to burn down the mosques.
Three weeks before March 15, an anonymous 4Chan post referenced two mosques in Christchurch, replying to someone bemoaning the presence of Muslims in New Zealand.
“They are constructing a new mosque in Queenstown too,” the post said.
“Stay and fight. Stop running you weak f **** t”.
It is likely the same man, but not distinct enough to be sure.
The night before, he spoke to his mum and sister on the phone. He said he loved them.
He arose early, leaving the remaining fragments of his tiny world in piles and drove up to Christchurch. He turned on his camera, and executed the plan.
Nobody, it is said, could have seen it coming.