New Zealand attacker, 32, radicalized by neighbors, according to mother
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – The mother of an Islamic State-inspired extremist who stabbed shoppers in a New Zealand supermarket said her son was radicalized by neighbors from Syria and Iraq who helped him recover from an injury.
The attacker, Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, was a 32-year-old Tamil Muslim from Sri Lanka. He arrived in New Zealand 10 years ago on a student visa and applied for refugee status on the basis of being persecuted back home in the island nation off the southern coast of India.
Samsudeen was shot and killed by police, who said five people were stabbed and two others injured in the chaos of last week’s attack in Auckland.
His mother, Mohamedismail Fareetha, said his descent into extremism began after he fell several stories in 2016 while attending university.
“Because he did not have anyone there, it was people from Syria and Iraq who helped him. It looks like they brainwashed him. Then he started posting on Facebook,” Fareetha said in a phone interview Saturday with a local TV station from her home in eastern Sri Lanka.
“He changed only after going abroad,” she said.
Police first noticed Samsudeen’s online support for terrorism in 2016, and the following year he was arrested at
Auckland Airport. He was headed for Syria, authorities say, presumably to join the Islamic State insurgency. He was later released on bail.
“After being arrested in 2017, he talked less with us; it was about once every three months,” Fareetha said, adding that two of her other sons “were angry with him and scolded him.”
In a statement Saturday, Fareetha’s son Aroos said his brother “would hang up the phone on us when we told him to forget about all the issues he was obsessed with. Then he would call us back again himself when he realized he was wrong. Aathil was wrong again yesterday. Of course we feel very sad he could not be saved.”