‘So heartbreaking’: funerals begin for nation’s attack victims
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND
Azaam Afaan did — not want to be late. The first funeral since Friday’s terrorist attack was about to begin, and although he had no idea who was being buried, he just knew he needed to participate.
Staring through dark sunglasses at the cemetery’s fringe — fighting back tears for a slain friend, as hundreds of mourners approached a hilltop of dirt cut open with row after row of graves — he said he wanted to be part of someone’s goodbye.
“It’s like you’re short of breath,” he said, explaining what it has been like to wait so long for the burials to begin after a gunman killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch. “Now we can breathe freely. They’re going to the place they’re supposed to be.”
Islam’s rituals of death prioritize immediate burial and a joyful departure. But as the first six victims were laid to rest Wednesday in a city where flowers and police tape still fill intersections, opportunities for relief continued to be elusive, drawing out sorrow, allowing time for relatives to arrive from abroad and delivering closure in spare droplets.
The process of identifying bodies has been, by all accounts, meticulous, in line with international standards and New Zealand’s strict procedures for murder victims. It has also been divisive.
Some of the affected families described the process as paternalistic.
“We’ve been doing this for 1,400 years — we don’t need instructions,” Saad Nasser, 57, said as he departed the day’s first funeral, for Khalid Mustafa, 44, and his son, Hamza Mustafa, 16, Syrian refugees who had moved to New Zealand last year.
Families and some officials spoke of rifts emerging as coroners work overtime to identify the victims while many wonder what is taking so long to bury the dead.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters Wednesday that she shared the families’ frustration.
“I know the process has been incredibly difficult and frustratingly slow,” she said.
Waiting and longing
The limbo of loss without burial has rearranged the routines of life across Christchurch, where new buildings sit beside empty lots — reminders of the earthquakes that devastated the city in 2010 and 2011.
This city of around 375,000 people is for the moment filled with emptiness — with children out of class and offices unused — and also flooded with the world’s humanity.
In their simple home at the edge of a quiet park, Nadim Than, 58, the uncle of Talha Rashid and brother of Naeem Rashid — who tried to tackle the gunman when he first entered the Al Noor Mosque during Friday Prayer, only to be shot and killed — welcomed not just long-missed brothers and other relatives from Pakistan on Wednesday.
He said his family had received at least 50, and probably closer to 100, visitors paying respects: Christians, Hindus, Sikhs; well-wishers from Fiji, Australia, England, and New Zealand itself.
“We feel energized when someone comes,” he said. “At night we feel uneasy because we have no one.”
Their brother, the one who had always been the highachiever in business and faith — “Naeem the Great” was how he signed his letters as a child — was gone. And still unseen.
Earlier in the day, Than had sent a text message to a reporter: “No update on bodies received here.”
In many ways, that was the craving that needed most to be satisfied.
Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Wednesday that the authorities were working long hours, with extra assistance. He corrected the timeline of the attack, noting that the police had arrested the suspect 21 minutes after the first distress call, down from the initial police report of 36 minutes.
But he also said that as of 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, roughly 80 hours after the shootings, New Zealand authorities had identified and planned to release just 21 bodies.
The mourners
Outside the Linwood cemetery, a potent silence surrounded most of those who entered, leaving only the sound of a breeze blowing through fall leaves.
The mourners started to appear in droves just before 11 a.m. for the first funeral, for Khalid Mustafa and his son, Hamza.
The Mustafa family had fled civil war and spent several years in Jordan waiting for a country to accept them.
They arrived in New Zealand in July, and eight months later, they were killed in the attack, leaving behind a grieving family.
Afaan, 38 and originally from Fiji, spoke quietly of the dead.
“This is the final resting place for them, from here onward,” he said.
Inside, hundreds of mourners — close friends and visitors from around the world who never knew them — squeezed together in groups, men at the front, women near the back.
Just before 12:30 p.m., Sheikh Mohmmad Amir, the chairman of the Religious Advisory Board of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, advised everyone that together they would say the Salat al-Janazah, the Muslim funeral prayer featuring a call and response with four recitations of “Allahu akbar,” then walk with the family as they carried the dead to the graves.
“It’s just so heartbreaking,” Shazia Bano, 35, said as she walked to her car.
A few hours later, at 5 p.m., it was time for more.
Thicker clouds had gathered, the wind had picked up and the crowd looked a bit smaller. One by one, four more bodies were prayed over and carried to their final resting places.
There was Junaid Ismail, 36, a Christchurch native who worked at the family business, a dairy. He had a wife and three children.
There was Ashraf Ali, a longtime Christchurch resident originally from Fiji, and Lilik Abdul Hamid, originally from Indonesia. Cheerful and well-liked, he had been an aircraft maintenance engineer with Air New Zealand for 16 years.
Finally, there was a man the police had identified but did not release his name. He was the first one killed — the victim linked to the one murder charge currently laid against the suspect, Brenton H. Tarrant, who is expected to face many more.
He was laid to rest surrounded as the sun faded by those he loved and those he barely knew. Christchurch, finally, was beginning to move on.