Under the Radar – ABC Four Corners

 

00.00.27

DR GREGORY JENKS, ANGLICAN DEAN, GRAFTON: Grafton is a monochrome, traditional, beautiful little country town. We now have forever, probably, the distinction of you know having given the world a man who's turned out to be Australia's worst mass murderer at this point in time.

00.00.47

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Ten days ago, Christchurch, New Zealand experienced an act of terror like none before.

During Friday prayers, fifty Muslims at two separate mosques were shot dead, another fifty injured.

00.01.08

HISHAM EL ZEINY: People you know, dead, people who were alive 5 minutes ago, just praying. They have done nothing. They have done nothing.
00.01.28
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: It was an attack calculated for the social media age, intricately planned, filmed and streamed live online for a global audience.

00.01.41

PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER : My feeling is that he chose New Zealand because it was a soft target in terms of security and perhaps he chose it to make a point, to illustrate that even a relatively tolerant quiet society on the very edge of the world was not immune to terrorism.

00.02.04

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: The attack has exposed deep flaws in the counter-terrorism strategies of Western nations like New Zealand and Australia.

00.02.14

ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: Authorities have absolutely failed to understand and grasp the threat of far-right extremism . The Christchurch shooter should absolutely not have fallen under the radar and the fact that he did is evidence of a massive failing in global counter terrorism strategies.
00.02.33
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Tonight on 4 Corners, we investigate the rise of right-wing extremism. And ask - how did the killer fly under the radar....even after posting clues in plain sight?

STORY TITLE: 'Under the Radar' 
REPORTER: Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop

00.03.10

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: It was lunchtime in Hagley Park, central Christchurch.

On Fridays the city's tiny Muslim community comes together at the mosque on Deans Avenue. 

00.03.24
KATH JAMIESON : Friday prayers time here is a really busy time. There's people everywhere, cars everywhere. It's really alive. Particularly around lunch time, when people are coming and going, and you know the mosque has been part of this community forever really. It's been here as long as all of our houses around here and they're part of our community they're New Zealanders. They're welcome here. 
00.03.57
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Former Imam, Hisham El Zeiny arrived early for Friday prayers
00.04.05
HISHAM EL ZEINY: As usual I went inside the mosque and sat in my usual place I usually sit in a particular certain place every time on Friday, which is left hand side, front of the mosque, the extreme left-hand side. 
00.04.19
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Parangit Singh and his wife Charu were at home a few doors down from the mosque.

00.04.25

CHARU SHARMA : Actually my son goes for his kindy at So, I just packed him up, gave to my husband, okay, said goodbyes, I just came out to check the letterbox, some letters are there, some things are there, because I was expecting a courier from India. So when I came here, I just, like this, I saw somebody moving around. 

00.04.54
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: A man with a military style semi-automatic rifle was walking towards the mosque.

00.05.04
HISHAM EL ZEINY: We heard fire, shotguns. And at the beginning I thought this was somebody shooting from the street who is going to come inside to scare us off. There was a burst of fire and then brief silence, then another burst. Silence, then two or three bursts, each one about 15 shots. And it was getting closer. The entrance of the mosque is a small hall which is about five, six meters long, and then it goes into the main prayer hall. So people in that day, because the mosque was full, are sitting on the floor in that hall on that corridor and he was killing them. But the fire was coming closer and closer and you can see the sparkle of the fire coming when he's shooting, you can see this glow comes out. So he went back out to the main street, shot some people there, came back to the mosque, point blanking people, then went out, got t another gun going back to the mosque, taking his time all the way as if he knew the police weren't coming. There was no rush at all in what he did.
00.06.15
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Yasir Amin and his father arrived late for prayers 
00.06.21
YASIR AMIN: We were walking down to the mosque and on the way, I heard a gunshot. After the gunshot, I saw a guy who was climbing the wall, so definitely he was running away from the shooting. I saw him shooting the other guy who was climbing the wall, so definitely in my mind it was like he might shoot us as well, so we have to avoid that shooting. That's why I told my dad to run away because that shooting going on, we need to run away 
So, we ran to other direction, and while he stopped there and with his gun, he started shooting on us and I was a couple of steps ahead of my father, so while, during the shooting, I stopped because ... I stand down and I stopped to tell my father, "Please lay down." When I turned back, he was lying down so I thought maybe he heard my voice. At the same time, the shooter, he drove away the car. I realized when I'd gone back to my dad and there he lies, so there's a blood around his body. He got a couple of bullets.
00.07.54
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: At first nearby residents were oblivious to what had happened.

00.08.00

KATH JAMIESON : I just nipped out to the shops for a short time and came back down Deans Avenue about nine minutes after the shooting started and tried to get in from this lane down here, and people saying, "No, no, don't go down there, there's been a shooting." I went right around Hagley Park, and as we're coming past the hospital, there were police everywhere with guns running around, ambulances we could hear.

00.08.32

By the time we got up to the end of Deans Avenue, the were some ambulances there. There were people covered in blood. There were people out who'd come screaming out of the mosque, who were just so shocked. Devastated people crying. I asked one young man what had happened. He said, "There's been a shooting, I was in the mosque." He said, "There are people dead everywhere." I was just shocked, horrified, and I just held his arm and said, "We're with you. Whatever happens, we're with you."

00.09.04

PARANGIT SINGH: I see that everyone is running on this way, and one body's on the footpath, and one couple who is standing down here, she's a pregnant lady, I think five or six months. And we just take a water jar from our house and give both of them water and start helping them to other people to give some water, because they are very ... not able to talk anyone. But I just realized to help them.

00.09.31

CHARU SHARMA : Then we brought them inside and they were ... everything, they had bruises on them. They survived. A man was bleeding. He helped him out. Wiped his wounds and gave him a Band-aid. We left our house to lead them to their own places. And we just gave them first aid, everything we can do.
00.09.55
KATH JAMIESON: That's when we saw the car that was just down there, and the people that were in that car had been going to the mosque, and the guy started shooting at them. The gunmen, and the cars riddled with bullets and all the windows are blown out. They'd backed up the car in a hurry into our lane here. There was a guy out there dead, just lying there in his socks. He had obviously tried to run away from the gunman and probably was coming through here to escape and gunned down, just lying there, dead. Just at the front of the lane there. Just shocking, absolutely shocking.
00.10.39
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP : When the police asked you to come out, what did you see?

00.10.45

HISHAM EL ZEINY : They asked us to stand up, hold our hands and follow him in line. So we followed him in line, and as we were going outside, they were leading us outside the mosque, we found dead bodies on the ground, people we knew lying on the ground dead . People you know, dead. People who are alive five minutes ago, just praying, have done nothing. They have done nothing. This hatred has no place among human beings, shouldn't, shouldn't.

00.11.35

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: As the extent of the carnage became apparent, police responded to reports of another attack at a second mosque 5 kilometres away. 

A fleet of ambulances rushed the injured to hospital 

00.11.51
As night fell, Haroon Feroz arrived to visit his uncle who had been shot .

00.11.57

HAROON FEROZ : He tried to hide like on the corner by the door and there were like two, three dead bodies just dropped on top of him and he was like, just there and then there was like blood all over him so he just pretended that he's also dead until the guy like reloaded the magazine and then came for the second round. And then when he actually came for the second round, that's when he got shot twice. One just kissed him on the hip and then the second one actually went on his back and at that point he lost consciousness and he was like a lot of pain, but he stood still, and he just tried to just get through that moment, you know, which was the most terrifying moment anyone can ever imagine. Very, very terrifying.

00.12.37

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP So, he hid under the bodies?

HAROON FEROZ : Under the bodies, from what I understood, just to protect himself because they were dead already, they were like completely, they were shot multiple times. 

00.12.55

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Police arrested 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant 36 minutes after the shootings began.

00.13.14

Judge: Brenton Harrison Tarrant

00.13.17

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP : The next day he appeared in Court charged with murder.

00.13.22
Mr Tarrant you are remanded without plea , next appearance will be in the Christchurch High Court on 5 April 2019 at 9.15 am, I've noted that you're not making an application to be admitted to bail. I've also noted that you're not making any application for suppression of publication of your name or of any particular that could lead to your identification .

Court officer: As your Honour pleases, stand down in custody.

00.14.10

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Police investigations led to a modest home on a quiet street in the small city of Dunedin, south of Christchurch.

Tarrant lived here virtually unnoticed in the 18 months before his arrest.

Tarrant's house is now at the centre of the biggest police investigation in New Zealand's history.

The question confronting police and intelligence agencies is how did he manage to fly completely under the radar while planning a mass murder?

And have the authorities been so focused on Islamic extremism, that they've under estimated another deadly threat, the rise of white supremacists around the world?

00.15.03
In Australia, police are focussing on northern New South Wales including Grafton where Brenton Tarrant grew up.

Singing church hymn

00.15.37

CHURCH SERVICE: I like you are absolutely shocked this could happen on our doorstep, but it has, and the ramifications have spilled over into the broader community of Grafton and honestly friends our hearts are truly broken

00.15.57

DR GREG JENKS, ANGLICAN DEAN, GRAFTON: Grafton is a small but very traditional country town. It's very much a homogenous, Anglo culture. It's unusual to see a person at the shopping centre who's not Anglo. If the town is very homogenous, then you're not used to seeing anybody other than somebody who looks like yourself, and if that is being fed somewhere along the line by some nasty website that's blaming the Muslims or the Afghans or whoever for our problems, then you can sort of see . They don't actually have the cultural literacy skills to actually navigate that cesspool that they've kind of, or whirlpool that they've got themselves caught up in.

00.16.50
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Tarrant's father drove a garbage truck; his mother was a teacher.

Friends describe an awkward boy, obsessed with computer games, who was picked on at school for his weight.

00.17.04

DR GREG JENKS, ANGLICAN DEAN, GRAFTON: I don't know Brenton particularly, so I don't know what his success rate at school was like and so on. But he clearly was somebody who didn't go on to university, he got very involved in the gym and personal fitness and so on. He got a job eventually working in a gym, he was obviously going to the gym, he got into one of those programmes where you become a personal trainer. 
00.17.29
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Becoming a gym junkie was life changing for Tarrant. In 2011 he boasted online:

"I run fitness classes with 20+ people daily who do nothing but stare, ask questions and mimic my movements for 60 minutes. And I enjoy it. My self-respect is through the roof, I can truly do anything I put my mind to... I am a goddamn monster of willpower, I just need a goal or object to work towards."

In another post, he wrote:

"There is more to life than money. But while ever I work I do not have time to do what I truly enjoy doing, playing video games, snorting coke and hiring strippers."
00.18.17
NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : He fits a bit of a profile in terms of white supremacist and right-wing extremist, that they more often than not have not achieved any particular success in terms of their professional or personal lives . In a sense you can say that what they're looking is for something to take their frustrations out with, frustrations about a range of different things.

00.18.46

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: When Tarrant was twenty, his father took his own life while battling mesothelioma.

Tarrant left Grafton.
His travels took him to New Zealand, Southeast Asia, China, North Korea, and later Turkey, Europe, Africa and Pakistan and exposed him to a whole new world of ideas.

00.19.13

NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : We understand that he was the beneficiary of a large inheritance, and for whatever reason he just decided to spend a lot of time and money traveling. There is nothing untoward about a number of the places that he's gone. North Korea does stand out. That is not a tourist destination , it's not a business destination. 
00.19.35
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Tarrant was in Europe in April 2017, when an Uzbek asylum-seeker and suspected Islamic State sympathiser drove a truck into a department store in Stockholm.

The attack killed five people including an 11-year-old girl.

Tarrant became fixated on this attack. He was obsessed with immigration levels in Europe, the history of Europe's wars, and the delusion that the white race was being over-run. 
00.20.07
DR DAVID KILCULLEN, COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGIST: He talks in his manifesto about being radicalised by seeing Muslims in France, in particular, and that he also visited a number of famous historic battle sites in Europe. In the manifesto, and in what he says, he seems to be tapping into much more of a white supremacist European narrative rather than an Australian or an American narrative. And in particular, he refers to, Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out a horrendous bombing and gun massacre in Oslo in 2011. 

00.20.49

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Tarrant's travels coincided with the rise of an increasingly aggressive right-wing movement across Europe and the United States.

It erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017

PROTESTORS CHANTING "Blood and soil . blood and soil"
00.21.07
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: The scenes evoking Nazism revealed a movement that had largely been hiding in the darker corners of the internet.

PROTESTORS CHANTING "Blood and soil . blood and soil.."

00.21.19

ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: Charlottesville was a seminal moment for the global far right because it proved that the internet has given them the ability to mobilise a large number of people and to have a large real-world impact in the way they hadn't for decades prior to the rally. In the early 2000s a couple of dozen people at a single Klan or neo Nazi gathering would have been huge. Hundreds of people showed up from all around the United States and all around the world at Charlottesville and this is because the internet has given them the ability to disseminate their propaganda to a wider audience and to organise in a way that would have been impossible in an earlier age because there's just not enough of them in any one given city or area. 

00.21.59
MATT QUINN, FMR WHITE SUPREMACIST AND DERADICALISATION CONSULTANT: You've got someone that's like so angry and upset and isolated in the community, they're not going to go to the local tennis club and talk about all the bad things that are going for them in the world. So the only place that these people can currently find, you know, is these groups online.

00.22.15

PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER: It has been a game changer for these groups. The ability to be anonymous, the ability to convey their views cheaply, to do it one to many, to do it instantaneously. We have got some major questions to ask about extremist politics. In this case, white supremacists, extremist politics and the role of social and online media. It has been a disaster in terms of encouraging them and enabling them

00.22.46

SPEAKER AT RALLY: " we're a lucky country , we've seen what happens in other countries , In Europe"

00.22.50

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: The far right was also emerging out of the darkness in Australia.

SPEAKER AT RALLY: "Wherever Islam goes there is trouble.."

00.22.58

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: After the Lindt Cafe siege in December 2014, Reclaim Australia made a name for itself capitalising on rising Islamophobia.

SPEAKER AT RALLY: ".. they are not loyal Australians"

00.23.10

MATT QUINN, FMR WHITE SUPREMACIST AND DERADICALISATION CONSULTANT: : You know the far-right extremist groups you know, really did start coming out you know, with more confidence and online presence. You know, after and around the Lindt cafe and the federal election you know, especially with you know, Pauline Hanson, you know, people were supporting her , you know with the banning Muslim immigration .

00.23.32

SPEAKER AT RALLY : " ...that goes thought your veins , it is in your spirit , never forget it and always remember respect the honour and the mateship , that makes us who we are 
Aussie Aussie Aussie.. oi oi oi "

00.23.54

NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : With the upsurge of Islamic terrorism that has been used by some of those people who have long been involved in the white supremacist right wing extremist milieu to try to promote their views and potentially get some recruits.

Demonstrator: "If you want to see what a Fascist looks like they're right over there."

00.24.18

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: More militant groups splintered off from the movement.

One anti Islam hate group the United Patriots Front had more than 100-thousand Facebook followers, including Brenton Tarrant.

00.24.30

DEMONSTRATOR: The UPF Facebook page has been deleted by Facebook

00.24.35

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: On Saturday the ABC's Background Briefing revealed that in a 2016 Facebook comment, Tarrant praised the UPF's then leader, neo Nazi Blair Cottrell, as his "emperor"

00.24.50
ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: I think the fact that the shooter was commenting on neo Nazi Facebook pages absolutely should have tripped an alarm and again I would ask you to consider if this person had been registered with the government as owning a substantial number of firearms and a substantial amount of ammunition and had been commenting on a radical Islamic Facebook page that specifically advocated for holy war I think the government of New Zealand and the government of Australia would absolutely have been looking into this person before the shooting, he would not have been an unknown quantity.

00.25.24

DR DAVID KILCULLEN, COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGIST: Unfortunately it's not surprising that the shooter was an Australian. We in this country, unfortunately have a very robust right-wing uh extremist community. Uh, we have groups, I won't give their names, but we have a number of groups in Melbourne, in Sydney and elsewhere who are well known to the police and the security services who are have been engaged in various propaganda activities, training in the bush, carrying out leafleting and graffiti activities and generally trying to raise awareness around white supremacists, or neo-Nazi ideology, some of them are linked in some ways to the outlaw motorcycle gang culture, many are not, some of them come from the skinhead groups, others don't but there's, I would say conservatively three-hundred to five-hundred people that have been identified by state police or commonwealth organisations as potentially a threat. 
00.26.37
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: In the past four years, Australian authorities say they've thwarted multiple right-wing threats.

One man allegedly planned to bomb three targets in Melbourne.

00.26.56

On the New South Wales Central Coast, a Nazi sympathiser was caught with a stockpile of guns after saying he wanted to commit a mass shooting.

00.27.08

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: How close did they come to actually happening?

NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : Well, I think without timely intervention of security forces, there is a strong likelihood that they would have proceeded with their plans but you have to understand that we are talking about a relatively small group of individuals. They are not coordinated in the sense of a normal political structure. The names of the groups that they are involved in change. The people in those groups regularly have fallouts with each other. The reality is that with the extreme right wing in this country, a number of the more violent crimes that they have been associated with have been crimes of violence against each other, including homicides.

00.28.04

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP : The white nationalist movement also has deep roots in New Zealand, where the country's intelligence service has warned for years it's drastically underfunded.

00.28.15

PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER: Christchurch is the ground zero for the extreme right in New Zealand. They'd had that reputation from the 1970s, and certainly through the 1990s. I have always struggled to convey to New Zealanders the fact that A, they were here, and B, they were expressing extremely violent views about their fellow citizens, and C, that there was always the potential amongst those communities to enact the violence that they had articulated in documents or online

00.29.00

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP : There are now concerns that authorities in the West - preoccupied with the rise of Islamic extremism - failed to grasp the threat from the far right. 

00.29.12

ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: When ISIS began to expand in 2013-14, they had a significant internet component to the caliphate, they recruited thousands of foreign fighters using the internet, using Twitter and Facebook, and they spread an enormous amount of propaganda via social media and there was a massive global effort on behalf of these technology companies and on behalf of global law enforcement to shut that down and it was extremely successful. We have not seen anything close to the same sort of response and the same sort of concerted effort to stop the spread of far-right fascist propaganda on the internet and social media nor have we seen the same kind of monitoring in the spaces where they gather. 

00.29.58

NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : The scale of hate speech has hit new highs, and while we're reading some of the material coming from these groups and being absolutely appalled at it, it's actually symptomatic of what we're seeing on a wider scale across the social media where we are seeing what frankly is tantamount to a criminal offense. We have not had a lot of prosecutions that I'm aware of in relation to people sending hateful and arguably illegal messages, threatening people, and I think there's a case for that to be reviewed and improved.

00.30.46

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: In late 2017 Tarrant settled in Dunedin.

He rented a house, where neighbours say he kept to himself.

00.30.56

PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER: My feeling is that he chose New Zealand because it was a soft target in terms of security. The event has raised some real issues around gun control and gun licensing in this country, so it might be that he chose it because he could access the firearms that he required. And perhaps he chose it to make a point. I mean, perhaps he chose it to illustrate that even a relatively tolerant, quiet society on the very edge of the world was not immune to terrorism.

00.31.39

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Tarrant obtained a gun licence and joined the Bruce Rifle club south of Dunedin. It's a small club with just over 100 members .

Ray McLellan has lived near the club for the past 16 years.

00.31.55

RAY MCLELLAN: It's one of the only 600 metre ranges left in New Zealand, I believe, and so I imagine they would be going for accuracy over range and stuff like that with a variety of weapons and that's what they tend to practise.

00.32.12

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: What's the history and significance of the club to New Zealand?

RAY MCLELLAN : It's the I believe the oldest incorporated rifle club in New Zealand and I'm not too sure, but I think it was originated from the old days of the militia, when various communities organised militia and stuff like that and they set it up and it's just gone on from that, I guess.

00.32.47

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: In this tiny rural community locals are used to the sound of gun shots coming from the Bruce Rifle Club, but one neighbour's told us just three weeks before the Christchurch massacre there was a sustained barrage of gunfire like nothing she'd heard before.

In her words , "it sounded like war breaking out".
00.33.12
Members of the Bruce Rifle Club told Four Corners they saw no signs that Tarrant was dangerous:

"The Club is feeling shocked, stunned, betrayed and used that we've had this person in our Club who has used our facilities ... Our hearts and our sympathies go out to the friends, family, and loved ones of the victims and the people of Christchurch."
00.33.37
Police have spent days searching Tarrant's house

He had barely any furniture and his lease was due to run out at the end of this month. 

It was here that he wrote the final version of his so-called manifesto inspired by Norwegian far-right mass murderer , Anders Breivik 
00.34.00
PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER: Well I think it's a copy of the Breivik manifesto, which he published at the time of the killings in Norway, and at times it's incoherent, at times it's a rant. There's elements that are difficult to understand, but it also has the characteristics of modern supreme right views about the world, and the clash between white western societies and Islam and Muslims. So you see there the classic arguments about the threat to our, "White," and "Civilization." The threat in terms of the replacement theory, which is at the core of what he believes, which is the idea that Muslims are outbreeding whites, but they're also providing a cultural and economic threat.

00.34.51

DR GREG JENKS, ANGLICAN DEAN, GRAFTON: My hunch is that this manifesto which I'm not going to read, and I hope nobody will read it because we don't want to give oxygen to that sort of hatred, I presume it's been cobbled together with stuff from different Web sources and it's him for 70 odd pages spewing out his hatred and his prejudice.

00.35.11

ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: The Christchurch shooter's specific part of the internet he came from was a message board called 8Chan and specifically a chunk of 8chan called slash /pol. Now 8chan is one of the 5000 or so largest websites on the internet so it's quite popular and I would describe 8chan and other similar sites as almost a 24 hour a day Klan or neo-Nazi rally where every now and then someone will leave to commit a violent attack.

00.35.41

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: On Wednesday 13th March two days before the massacre, Tarrant flooded Facebook with posts on extreme right-wing themes

That same day he posted photos on twitter of guns and magazines covered with symbols of his fascist ideology

00.36.04

NEIL FERGUS, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONSULTANT : It should have raised the alarm if there were the appropriate agencies looking where they should have been looking, but as we've subsequently learned from looking at the situation in New Zealand that the competent authority in New Zealand appears to be struggling with its capability . So, they are not particularly well served in terms of resources, and this is a very resource-intensive activity. 
00.36.37
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: The day before the attack Tarrant updated his Facebook profile with the slogan "I am Hope" and "New Zealander of the Year"

At midday on the day of the attack, he posted links to his manifesto on Facebook.
At 1:28pm on the online message board 8chan he announced what he called "an attack against the invaders" and provided a link to a Facebook livestream.

3 minutes later, he emailed his manifesto to 70 addresses including the office of New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

At 1:40pm he walked into the mosque.

00.37.25
DR DAVID KILCULLEN, COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGIST: The moment I first heard about it, I knew it would probably be some kind of, um, white supremacist or neo-Nazi type attack. What I didn't expect was how, sort of flippant, and sarcastic and ironic the, um, the shooter would be. And when I saw the video, in particular, I realised that we were dealing with something quite new.

00.37.52

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP : On the 8chan message board, the live streamed attack was celebrated.

00.38.03

ROBERT EVANS, BELLINGCAT ONLINE EXTREMISM INVESTIGATOR: As he began to kill people I would describe the result of the other users on 8chan slash poll board as riotous glee. They were incredibly happy incredibly excited to be witnessing so many people being killed, so many Muslims being killed. 
If global law enforcement had been monitoring that board and watching when this person began his attack and posted his video, he was driving to the site of the attack for something like six minutes before he began shooting. You could clearly hear over the audio of his video the GPS directions telling anyone listening where he was going. If law enforcement from the United States or from Great Britain had been dealing with this the way they deal with Islamic terror which is where they communicate with each other, someone could have reached out to law enforcement in New Zealand and warned them about what was going to happen and warned them about what was going to happen and cut down the response time before armed police units arrived to intercept him significantly.

00.38.58

PROF. PAUL SPOONLEY, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM RESEARCHER : The fact that a 17-minute video was uploaded and then Facebook had to take down 1.5 million showings of that, and I would point out that they took down 1.2 million on upload, that leaves 300,000 that have been online for some time. I think it raises some fundamental questions about us as a society. Have we invested enough in social cohesion? Did we know enough about what was happening in our community? And of course, for me, one key question is we are never, ever going to say again that New Zealand doesn't have extreme right-wing activists.

CALL TO PRAYER 
00.40.47
SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Three days ago, thousands gathered for Friday prayers in the park across the road from Al Noor Mosque.

00.41.08

IMAM GAMAL FOUDA, AL NOOR MOSQUE: "Islamophobia kills. Muslims have felt its pain for many years. Islamophobia is real. It is a targeted campaign to influence people to dehumanise and irrationally fear Muslims. To fear what we wear, to fear the choice of food we eat, to fear the way we pray and to fear the way we practise our faith. We call upon governments around the world, including New Zealand and the neighbouring countries, to bring an end to hate speech and the politics of fear."

00.42.23

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: A community besieged by distrust and hate is praying for a turning point.

00.42.35

SEAN RUBINSZTEIN-DUNLOP: Do you think you would return to the mosque again?

HISHAM EL ZEINY: Definitely, I will. I wouldn't feel easy but definitely, I will. If we abandon the mosque, we give him what he wanted, and we should not do this. Seeing the response of the community, seeing the response of the community in New Zealand gives us strength. People are wonderful, and they're standing with us. But it wouldn't be easy, though. I mean, we'll definitely go back, but we'll never feel safe.

In memory of

Hati Mohemmed Daoud NABI 
Mohsen Mohammed AL HARBI
Kamel Moh'd Kamal Kamel DARWISH
Junaid ISMAIL
Mucaad IBRAHIM
Muse Nur AWALE
Hussein Mohamed Khalil MOUSTAFA
Mounir Guirgis SOLIMAN
Ghulam HUSSAIN
Muhammad Abdus SAMAD
Musa Vali Suleman PATEL
Ashraf ALI
Lilik Abdul HAMID
Amjad Kasem HAMID
Matiullah SAFI
Ashraf El-Moursy RAGHEB
Mohamad Moosid MOHAMEDHOSEN
Khaled Mwafak ALHAJ-MUSTAFA
Haroon MAHMOOD
Muhammad Zeshan RAZA
Syed Jahandad ALI
Ata Mohammad Ata ELAYYAN
MD Mojammel HOQ
Farhaj AHSAN
Ramiz Arifbhai VORA
Syed Areeb AHMED
Ozair KADIR
Tariq Rashid OMAR
Muhammad Haziq MOHD-TARMIZI
Hamza Khaled ALHAJ MUSTAFA
Sayyad Ahmad MILNE
Linda Susan ARMSTONG
Karam BIBI
Husna AHMED
Ahmed Gamal Eldin Mohamed ABDEL GHANY
Ali Mah'd Abdullah ELMADANI
Abdukadir ELMI
Abdelfattah QASEM
Osama Adnan Yousef ABUKWAIK
Muhammad Suhail SHAHID
Ansi KARIPPAKULAM ALIBAVA
Maheboob Allarakha KHOKHAR
Ashraf ALI
Arif Mohamedali VOHRA
Naeem RASHID
Mohammed Imran KHAN