The Christchurch mosque shootings were two consecutive mass shootings on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on 15 March 2019. They were committed by Brenton Tarrant who entered both mosques during Friday prayer, firstly at the Al Noor Mosque at 1:40 p.m. and later at the Linwood Islamic Centre at 1:52 p.m.
The attacks were mainly motivated by white nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white supremacist beliefs. Tarrant, who described himself as an ecofascist and voiced support for the far-right "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory in the context of a "white genocide", cited Anders Behring Breivik and Dylann Roof as well as several other right-wing terrorists as inspirations within his manifesto, praising Breivik above all.[16]
The attack was linked to an increase in white supremacy and alt-right extremism globally[17][18][19] observed since about 2015.[20][21] Politicians and world leaders condemned it,[22] and then-Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern described it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days".[23] The government established a royal commission into its security agencies in the wake of the shootings, which were the deadliest in modern New Zealand history and the worst ever committed by an Australian national.[24][25][26] The commission submitted its report to the government on 26 November 2020,[27] the details of which were made public on 7 December.[28]
The shooting has inspired copycat attacks,[b] especially due to its live-streamed nature. In response to this incident, the United Nations designated March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.
Brenton Harrison Tarrant (born 27 October 1990),[35][36] a white Australian man, was 28 years old at the time of the shootings.[37][38] He grew up in Grafton, New South Wales, where he attended Grafton High School.[37][39]
Tarrant's parents separated when he was young: this, along with other events including the loss of his family home in a fire and the death of his grandfather, led him to be traumatised and to start suffering from social anxiety. Following the separation of his parents, Tarrant and his sister Lauren, lived with their mother with her new partner. The relationship became violent, with the partner assaulting his mother, him and his sister. The two children began to live with their father Rodney Tarrant. He began to gain weight from age 12 to 15 which led to bullying at school, where he also had very few friends. He was disengaged at school, while also being unusually knowledgeable in certain topics such as the Second World War. Tarrant began exhibiting signs of racism from a young age, expressing concerns about immigration as early as 12 years old. He frequently made derogatory comments concerning his mother's former partner's Aboriginal heritage, which resulted in intervention by one of his high school teachers. This teacher, also serving as the Anti-Racism Contact Officer, intervened on two occasions, addressing instances of both anti-Aboriginal and anti-Semitic behavior.[40] He started using 4chan when he was 14. He once told his sister that he thought he was autistic and possibly sociopathic. Around 2007 when Tarrant was either 16 or 17, the father was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma. Tarrant began to exercise at gyms to cope and lost 52 kilograms. He joined the Big River Gym in Grafton at the end of his final year at Grafton High School and qualified as a personal trainer in mid-2009. In 2010 Tarrant discovered his father dead by suicide after having previously agreed with his father that he would do so. He inherited A$457,000 from his father, which largely came from the settlement of a claim for damages arising out of the exposure to asbestos, which had caused his father's mesothelioma. He stopped working at the Big River Gym in 2012 after suffering an injury and decided to use his inherited money to invest and travel.[41][42]
Tarrant arrived in New Zealand in August 2017 and lived in Andersons Bay in Dunedin until the shootings.[50][28][51] A neighbour described him as a friendly loner.[52] He was a member of a South Otago gun club, where he practised shooting at its range.[53][54] In 2018, Tarrant was treated for eye and thigh injuries at Dunedin Hospital; he told doctors he had sustained the injuries while trying to dislodge an improperly chambered bullet from a gun. The doctors also treated him for steroid abuse, but never reported Tarrant's visit to the authorities,[28] which would have resulted in police reassessing his fitness to hold a gun licence.[55]
Throughout his residence in Dunedin, Tarrant was unemployed, funding his living expenses and preparations for the terrorist attack using the money he received from his father and income from investments, including a rental property he and his sister had purchased in January 2017. When asked, he gave no concrete indication of his future plans once his funds were depleted, beyond mentioning to his sister the possibility of suicide and later telling family members and gaming friends that he intended to move to Ukraine.[56] Tarrant believed he would exhaust his funds by approximately August 2019. A document, dated late January 2019, was discovered in which he wrote, "15th March is go do rain or shine [sic]".[57]
Captivated with sites of battles between Christian European nations and the Ottoman Empire, Tarrant went on another series of visits to the Balkans from 2016 to 2018, with Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, and Bosnia-Herzegovina confirming his presence there in these years.[58][59] He posted Balkan nationalist material on social media platforms[60] and called for the United States to be weakened to prevent what he perceived as NATO intervention in support of Muslims (Albanians) against Christians (Serbs).[61][59][62] He said he was against intervention by NATO because he saw the Serbian military as "Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe".[61][62] By June 2016, relatives noted a change in Tarrant's personality, which he claimed was the result of a mugging incident in Ethiopia, and his mother had expressed concern for his mental health.[28]
Tarrant himself identified three key moments that shaped his ideology. The first was the murder of an 11-year-old girl, Ebba kerlund, in the 2017 Stockholm truck attack on 7 April 2017. (Her name was among the graffiti scrawled on the gun he used to commit the shooting). He also identified the defeat of Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential election as evidence that the possibility of democratic resolution had "vanished". The third key event was his trip to France where he had a strong emotional response to his perception that the French had become a "minority" in their own country, which he described as "fuming rage" and "suffocating despair". He was moved by visiting a military cemetery: "my despair turned to shame, my shame to guilt, my guilt to anger and my anger to rage".[63]
In 2016, three years prior to the attacks, Tarrant praised Blair Cottrell as a leader of the far-right movements in Australia and made more than 30 comments on the now-deleted "United Patriots Front" and "True Blue Crew" webpages. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation team who studied the comments called them "fragments and digital impressions of a well-travelled young man who frequented hate-filled anonymous messaging boards and was deeply engaged in a global alt-right culture."[64] A Melbourne man said that in 2016, he filed a police complaint after Tarrant allegedly told him in an online conversation, "I hope one day you meet the rope". He said that the police told him to block Tarrant and did not take a statement from him. The police said that they were unable to locate a complaint.[65]
Tarrant is thought to have become obsessed with terrorist attacks committed by Islamic extremists in 2016 and 2017, started planning an attack about two years prior to the shootings, and chosen his targets three months in advance.[66] Some survivors at the Al Noor Mosque believed they had seen Tarrant there on several Fridays before the attack, pretending to pray and asking about the mosque's schedules.[67] The Royal Commission report found no evidence of this,[68] and police instead believe that Tarrant had viewed an online tour of Al-Noor as part of his planning.[69]
On 8 January 2019, Tarrant used a drone operated from a nearby park to investigate the mosque's grounds.[70] Additionally, he used the Internet to find detailed mosque plans, interior pictures, and prayer schedules to figure out when mosques would be at their busiest levels.[71] On the same day, he had driven past the Linwood Islamic Centre.[70]
Police recovered six guns: two AR-15 style rifles (one manufactured by Windham Weaponry and the other by Ruger), two 12-gauge shotguns (a semiautomatic Mossberg 930 and a pump-action Ranger 870), and two other rifles (a .357 Magnum Uberti lever-action rifle, and a .223-caliber Mossberg Predator bolt-action rifle). Tarrant was granted a firearms licence with an "A" endorsement in November 2017,[72][73] and purchased weapons between December 2017 and March 2019, along with more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition.[71] According to a city gun store, Tarrant bought four firearms and ammunition online.[74] The shop did not detect anything unusual or extraordinary about the customer.[75] He used four 30-round magazines, five 40-round magazines, and one 60-round magazine in the shootings.[76] Additionally, he illegally replaced the semi-automatic rifles' small magazines with the higher capacity magazines purchased online, against the conditions of Tarrant's gun license.[77][78][79] He also modified the triggers of some of the firearms to allow for lighter trigger pressure and faster trigger resets.[71][80] He spent an estimated NZ$30,000 on firearm-related items.[81]
According to Stuff, Tarrant was wrongly granted a firearms licence due to police failures. Sources said that police failed to interview a family member as required for obtaining a firearms licence, instead interviewing two men that Tarrant had met through an online chatroom. In the days after the attacks, the police had quashed concerns that Tarrant had obtained the weapons inappropriately.[93]
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