Three people are in custody -- one of whom was charged with murder -- after at least one heavily-armed shooter mowed down Muslim worshippers at Friday prayer, massacring 49 people in two New Zealand mosques while broadcasting a horrific live stream of the terror attack.
A 28-year-old Australian-born citizen was in custody after claiming responsibility for the attacks in Christchurch and allegedly posting a white nationalist manifesto immediately before the murder spree. The man, who was not identified, was described by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as “an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist" and he is expected to appear in court on Saturday. He and three others who were detained – one of which who was later determined not to be tied to the attacks – were not on any watch lists, and one was a woman, investigators said.
"These are people who I would describe as having extremist views, that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and in fact have no place in the world," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said following the massacre.
"This is one of New Zealand's darkest days," News.com.au quoted her as saying, adding that the killings "happened in a place where people should’ve been expressing their religious freedom, where they should’ve been safe."
In addition to the dead, health officials said 48 people are currently being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds. Officials say the patients range from young children to adults and the injuries range from minor to critical. A dozen operating theaters are being used there and some patients will need multiple surgeries, while about 200 family members were at the hospital early Saturday awaiting news about their loved ones.
Officials said 41 people were killed at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch and seven were slain inside the Linwood Masjid mosque, about three miles away from Masjid Al Noor. Another person died at a local hospital.
Witness Len Peneha, who lives next door to the Masjid Al Noor mosque, told the Associated Press that he saw a man dressed in black enter the building and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.
Peneha said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, possibly the camera used to film the assault, giving him a military-type appearance. One witness cited in a report by News.com.au said the shooter was silent while carrying out the attack.
The video that was apparently live-streamed by the shooter shows the massacre in horrifying detail. The gunman spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshippers with bullets, sometimes re-firing at people he has already cut down.
At one point, he exits the mosque to re-arm before going back inside to shoot more people. Eventually, the man flees as emergency vehicles can be heard approaching in the background.
"There wasn’t even time to aim, there was so many targets," the man says, chillingly, as he drives away. Children's screams can be heard in the distance during the attack.
The video cut off after the man got back into his car, and now police are trying to block it from being circulated around the Internet.
In the other {second mosque] attack, witness Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald that he heard about five gunshots and that a Friday prayer-goer returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.
Nichols also said he saw two injured people being carried out on stretchers past his automotive shop and that both people appeared to be alive.
Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Friday night that a man had been charged with murder, but did not say whether police believed the same shooter was responsible for both attacks. The roles of the two others currently in custody are still being determined, and Ardern said there is no reason to believe there are any more suspects.
However, Bush warned mosques nationwide to “close your doors until you hear from us again.”
He also said police had found two improvised explosive devices in one car following the shooting, one of which they have disabled and another they are in the process of doing so.
...In the gunman's rambling manifesto, he appears to interview himself and claims he came to New Zealand only to plan and train for the attack. He said he was not a member of any organization, but had donated to and interacted with many nationalist groups, though he acted alone and no group ordered the attack.
He said the mosques in Christchurch and Linwood would be the targets, as would a third mosque in the town of Ashburton if he could make it there.
He said he chose New Zealand because of its location, to show that even the most remote parts of the world were not free of "mass immigration."
[Prime Minister Lucida Ardern] alluded at a news conference to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that while many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees, "they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us."
Last year, Ardern announced the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 starting in 2020. Ardern, whose party campaigned on the promise of raising the intake of refugees, called the planned increase "the right thing to do."
The identities of the deceased have not yet been revealed.
Retno Marsudi, Indonesia's foreign minister, said six Indonesians were inside the Masjid al Noor mosque when the shooting occurred and three escaped.
“We are looking for three other Indonesian citizens," Marsudi said.
Bangladesh's honorary consul in Auckland noted three Bangladeshis were killed in the attacks and at least four others were injured.
Members of the Bangladesh cricket team also said they narrowly escaped the shooting at the Masjid al Noor mosque. Players and coaching staff were reportedly getting off a bus when the shooting broke out. Tamim Iqbal, a batsman on the team, tweeted: “Entire team got saved from active shooters. Frightening experience and please keep us in your prayers.”
...Mass shootings in New Zealand are rare. Before Friday's attack, the deadliest shooting in modern history there occurred in the small town of Aramoana in 1990, when gunman David Gray shot and killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbor.
While I certainly don't endorse going into a mosque and shooting people, that sounds just like the reassuring public statements of U.S., German, Swedish and Australian public officials, that muslim immigrants are "part of us" and are "a benefit" to the community. If they are, it is the first nation in the world to receive muslim immigrants that truly do assimilate, don't spike the rate of rapes, antisemitic violent attacks, desecration of Jewish graveyards, and honor killings.
This shooter would have served his cause better by NOT killing people, and instead using his mobile camera to document and expose social problems caused by muslim immigration in Australia or New Zealand. His slaughtering people just makes critics of muslim immigration look crazy, dangerous and intolerant. And masks what a threat mass islamic immigration truly is. Particularly in Europe.
The terrorist who opened fire on a New Zealand mosque full of worshippers sent his online manifesto to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and 70 others minutes before he begun his attack.
Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, published 'The Great Replacement' the morning before opening fire at two mosques in Christchurch, on New Zealand's south island. Tarrant live streamed his attack on the Al Noor mosque on Facebook.
He sent the manifesto to about 70 recipients, including National leader Simon Bridges and Parliament Speaker Trevor Mallard, the NZ Herald reported.
The other recipients who received the shocking document were media organisations, both in New Zealand and international.
A spokesman from the Prime Minister's Office said the 'manifesto' was sent to an email account managed by Ms Ardern's office, not her personal account. The worker in the office that opened the email immediately sent it to Parliamentary security who referred it to police. 'It does not set out what he was about to do. It was written as if it had occurred, to explain what obviously was about to play out,' the spokesman said.
The horrific attack killed 50 people and left more than 40 in hospital suffering from gunshot wounds.
Four arrests were made, including Tarrant, two men and a woman. Bombs attached to a pair of cars owned by the suspects were disarmed.
The chilling 73-page manifesto details his twisted grievances, why he picked the mosques in Christchurch and how he was inspired by Norway mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 in 2011.
Self-confessed terrorist Tarrant faced a New Zealand court on Saturday charged with murder.
'I have read the writings of Dylan Roof and many others, but only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik,' he wrote. Tarrant's reference to Breivik as a 'Knight' relates to the Norwegian's support for the Knights Templar - an extremist Christian group of specialist fighters from the 12th century.
Tarrant also claimed he had been inspired to carry out the attacks as 'revenge' for a terror attack in Sweden that claimed a young girl among its victims.
'There was a period of time two years prior to the attack that dramatically changed my views. The period of time was from April 2017 to May 2017,' he wrote. In the manifesto Tarrant said he initially planned to target a mosque in Dunedin, but changed to the Al Noor and Masjid Mosques because they had 'far more invaders'.
Explaining his plans the massacre, the shooter wrote that: 'To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people. 'By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.'
He also revealed he did not initially plan to carry out the attack in New Zealand at all.
'I only arrived in New Zealand to live temporarily while I planned and trained, but I soon found out that New Zealand was as target rich of an environment as anywhere else in the West,' Tarrant wrote.
'Secondly an attack in New Zealand would bring to attention the truth of the assault on our civilisation.'
He also claimed to be inspired by Candace Owens, an outspoken right-wing commentator in the US. 'The person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens, each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights.'
[more at link]
It creeps me out that I constantly have to visit foreign news-sites to see details that the liberal Newspeaak U.S. media doesn't want to report.
Only on Fox do you learn the shooter's choice of a state model closest to his ideology is China. He's a leftist radical environmentalist, who thinks massive third-world immigration is destroying the environment.
Asked if he supported Trump, the shooter said "Yeah, I guess, as a symbol of revived white nationalism, but on general policy, God no". That's not exactly a glowing endorsement. And again, based on the fact that under Trump U.S. immigration is only 18% European, I don't see Trump as an actual white nationalist, or a symbolic model for enacting a white nationalist state. On top of the fact Trump has condemned white nationalism in the harshest terms, as cited and quoted by reporter Mollie Hemmingway on Mediabuzz (3-17-2019), Trump has repeatedly and very specifically condemned white nationalists, and the media simply doesn't report it, and lyingly perpetuates a false narrative as if Trump has not conemned them, when he has!
Trump could repeat his condemnation 100 times, 1,000 times or 10,000 times, and the liberal media would still act like Trump didn't condemn white supremacists in the harshest terms, and he media continuously implies if not says that Trump supports white nationalists. Despite Trump's clear and repeated condemnations.
And then (as detailed by Carlson in the above quoted statements) the Auckland shooter says that he chose guns to wage his terrorist attack, so as to incite division and race war in the United States. Again, that's not a Trump supporter, that's a leftist radical on the opposite side of the political spectrum, who wants to destroy the United States. And is saying whatever it takes to stoke that division, by alleging Trump helps his cause. And the media is reporting the shooter's ambiguous praise of Trump in a way that promotes the shooter's talking points, without exploring how he clearly said that to divide the U.S. and damage Trump. Because the media also wants to divide the U.S. and damage Trump. The shooter boasted this in almost exactly those words, and the media simply won't report those facts.
But on CNN and MSNBC, they spin the shooter as pro-Trump and stoked to kill muslims by Trump, despite the shooter's clearly stated purpose to damage Trump and divide the United States, his ideal is even to stoke it into a race war. The media is fronting a blatantly false narrative that the shooter was motivated to kill by Trump's policy and "white supremacist" rhetoric. Gee, why do people not trust the liberal media?
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
By who? The guy seemed proud of his shooting, and left a long manifesto.
It does seem rather elaborately planned for one guy, but otherwise he seemed glad to take credit for it and go to jail for it. Similar to the Norway shooter.
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