New Zealand police charged Australian Brenton Tarrant with murder in a brutal spree that killed 49 people at two New Zealand mosques, Australian government officials familiar with the charges said.
The suspect wasn’t on any security-agency watch lists before allegedly gunning down worshipers Friday in a terrorist attack, New Zealand’s prime minister said.
After the horror of the violence, attention is turning to the motivation of the person who decided to target the country’s tiny Muslim minority and where he got the guns.
Around the time of the attacks, a hate-filled, 70-plus page manifesto espousing white supremacist views was posted on a Facebook page under Mr. Tarrant’s name.
The author of the manifesto said he was a 28-year-old man born in Australia to a working class, low-income family. He said he supported many right-wing attackers and was most inspired by Anders Behring Breivik, convicted of carrying out a 2011 attack in Norway that left 77 people dead.
The author said he supported others who committed racially motivated attacks, including the 2015 shooting that left nine people dead at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C. Both Breivik and the convicted Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, are currently in prison.
The author of the manifesto said he ultimately picked New Zealand to show that “even in the remotest areas of the world … there was no where left to go that was safe and free from mass immigration,” which he said undermined his view of civilization, and that he considered the incident to be a terror attack.
The manifesto said he began planning the attack two years ago, and he initially wanted to live temporarily in New Zealand in part to train for the assault. He settled on Christchurch as the target three months ago, the manifesto said.
“I am not a direct member of any organization or group, though I have donated to many nationalist groups and have interacted with many more,” said the manifesto’s author, who claimed to be a private and mostly introverted person.
Australian local media reported that Mr. Tarrant was from Grafton, a town of 19,000 about a six-hour drive north of Sydney, where he once worked as a personal trainer.
It couldn’t be determined whether Mr. Tarrant had retained a lawyer.
Rodger Shanahan, a research fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute who specializes in Middle Eastern security and terrorism, said investigators will likely be focused on what kind of training the attacker may have received and whether there could be a larger network of right-wing radicals in New Zealand.
“The white-supremacist threat is going to have to be reassessed,” Mr. Shanahan said.
Another question for investigators will be how the shooter was able to amass an arsenal of weapons in a country where gun ownership is tightly controlled.
Asked at a news conference whether law enforcement might be fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the focus of intelligence and security services is on extremism regardless of where it comes from. “We need to be blind in that regard,” she said.
New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said part of the investigation will determine whether law enforcement missed any opportunities to prevent the attack.
Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com and Rob Taylor at rob.taylor@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-zealand-shooting-suspect-is-28-year-old-australian-11552660359
2019-03-15 18:19:00Z
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