July 16, 2025 • 52 mins
On March 15, 2019, New Zealand was shattered by a terrorist attack unlike any in its history. Fifty-one worshippers were murdered and dozens more wounded when a gunman opened fire inside two mosques in Christchurch, livestreaming his rampage to the world.
We speak with journalist Joey Watson, creator of Secrets We Keep: Lone Actor, who traces the radicalisation of the attacker, from online echo chambers to a global network of extremists who silently supported his deadly mission.
What really motivated this Australian man to commit such horror? And what did law enforcement miss along the way?
You can listen to Secrets We Keep: Lone Actor here.
Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes.
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Guest: Joey Watson
Host: Claire Murphy
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. It's a Friday
afternoon in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Families are
exchanging warm greetings at the Alnor Mosque while their children
laugh and play in the foyer. Today, around one hundred
(00:26):
and ninety worshippers have gathered preparing to kneel for Jimua,
the most sacred prayer of the Muslim week. The atmosphere
is peaceful, it's serene. Few could have imagined just how
quickly that peace would descend into unspeakable horror. Just outside,
on the quiet suburban road, a man pulls into the
(00:47):
driveway next to the mosque. He's alone, dressed in camouflage
and a tactical vest with ammunition magazines strapped to his waist.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He'd also attached.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
A go pro camera to his helmet, and from that
he would start streaming live on Facebook. Hello, lads, he says,
let's get this party started.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
You can see his.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Hands on the wheel before he turns to the passenger seat.
On it is sitting several guns. They're marked with white lettering.
Now these words wouldn't make much sense to those of
us who can't read syrillic script, but for the families
of people who'd survived a genocide in Europe decades before,
it would be a shock. In the boot of the car,
next to some plastic shopping bags and some red fuel cans,
(01:31):
sits yet more guns. You see him reach for a
bluetooth speaker, pressing buttons to start playing a song, and
the jaunty accordion music that then filters out through the
car covers up the darkness of the lyrics. He'd already
been listening to several songs on the drive in Serbia,
Strong and anti Muslim track and the British Grenadiers, a
(01:51):
traditional British military march. At exactly one thirty nine pm,
he steps out of the car, heavily armed, and walks
towards the mosque. He ignores the three people who walk
past him on the street. They aren't his target. Instead,
we follow his camo clad gloves holding his rifle around
a corner towards the mosque.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
We watch on as he approaches.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
The first victim, a worshipper, who greets him with a
polite hello, brother. Just as without warning, the man behind
the camera raises his shotgun and opens fire, killing four
people on the spot. He throws that shotgun to the
ground and grabs his semi automatic AR fifteen, killing two
more men in the hallway near the entrance. He's attached
(02:35):
a strobe light to the gun and it disorientates the victims,
so in the main hall, which is packed with worshipers
with nowhere to go, he would then mow down dozens
of people where they knelt. He shoots at every person
he sees, as well as into the side rooms as
he passes. Worshippers can be seen scrambling for cover, trying
(02:55):
to shield their loved ones, searching for exits as panic
tears through the building. Amid the chaos, though there are
moments of extraordinary bravery. Naim Rashid ran towards the attacker
in a desperate attempt to stop him, an act of
courage that would cost him his life and earn him
a posthumous bravery award. Just two minutes into the attack,
(03:17):
people start calling police. The gunman moves outside. He's still
firing off rounds, but he's returned to his car to
retrieve another gun. He then heads back through the mosque
southern gate, killing two people who've tried to hide behind
the cars. He goes back inside the building, shooting dead
those he'd previously wounded. After six harrowing minutes, the gunman
(03:39):
returns to his car again, and this time he drives away,
running over the body of a woman he'd killed as
he fires shots out the window at worshipers running from
the horror behind his fleeing vehicle. Is a scene of
utter chaos. The cries of the wounded would mix in
with the sounds of sirens as police finally arrive, not
(04:00):
realizing that the car holding the man they wanted to
stop was leaving just as they pulled up up, their
view of him obscured by a passing bus. But the
rampage doesn't end there. Speeding through christ Church's streets at
over one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, weaving through
lanes and into oncoming traffic, the government makes his way
(04:21):
to the Linwood Islamic Center. Now the live stream ends here.
The connection to Facebook interrupted right before the attacker aims
a shotgun at the driver of another vehicle, pulling the
trigger twice, but it fails to fire both times. While
the live stream has ended, the GoPro continues to record,
(04:42):
so at one fifty two PM, it captures the very
moment he pulls into the driveway outside the Linwood Building,
where around one hundred people are beginning their prayers. He
blocks the entrance to the car park so no one
can leave. He again steps out and opens fire, but
unable to initially find the front door, he instead shoots
those who are still outside and into the building through
(05:04):
the windows as he grabs yet another gun from his car.
Abdul Aziz Wahabzadah runs outside and throws a payment terminal
at him in an attempt to stop the violence. The
gunman fires back but misses. Aziz picks up an empty
shotgun that's been thrown to the ground, and taking cover
amongst the nearby cars, he yells out his location, attempting
(05:28):
to draw the man to him and away from the building.
His valiant efforts, however, fail, and the armed man enters
the center, shooting and killing three more people. As he
emerges from the building, Aziz confronts him again. The man
pulls a bayonet from his vest, but instead of attacking Aziz,
he returns to his car, and just four minutes.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
After his arrival drives away.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
By this stage, police now have a description of the vehicle.
The two thousand and five Subaru outback was spotted by
a police unit, which then rammed the vehicle off the road.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Now the man would later admit there was actually on.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
His way to his third target, another mosque in Ashburton's
southwest of Christchurch. In just thirty six minutes, fifty one
people were killed, the oldest victim seventy seven, the youngest
just three, as eighty nine others lay wounded in what
would become New Zealand's darkest day, a moment of profound
(06:28):
grief and loss, witnessed not only by those who were
there that day, but by the entire world, all of
it live streamed. Thirty six minutes of horror, much of
it broadcast in real time, with people watching across the globe.
Now some felt helpless as that violence unfolded, desperate but
(06:48):
unable to intervene as innocent men, women and children fell
to the gunman's bullets, but not all of them. I'm
Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast
exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the
(07:09):
people who know the most about them. When the gunmen
arrived in court, he smiled at the collection of journalists
sent to cover the case, making an inverted okay gesture
with his hand, said to be a symbol for white supremacy.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Over the course of his trial, where he was.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Charged with fifty one counts of murder, forty of attempted murder,
and engaging in a terrorist act, a psychiatric assessment would
find he was of sound mind. He sent seven letters
during this time, one of them, addressed to Allan in Russia,
ended up posted on both the four chan and eight
chan websites. The six page letter, written in pencil on
(07:45):
a small notepad, mainly speaks of memories of his trip
to Russia in twenty fifteen, thanking his supporter for the
postage stamps he'd sent in order for him to be
able to correspond with him. He admits he can't go
into any detail about any regrets or feelings he has
about his situation, as the guards would just confiscate the letter,
but it ended with a statement that a great conflict
(08:06):
was and used language that could be raided as inciting
his supporters to violence. He would at one stage dismiss
his lawyers, deciding to represent himself and pleading guilty to
all ninety two charges. His sentencing was televised, the judge
informing him that he would be sentenced to life in
prison without the possibility of parole, New Zealand's first ever
(08:28):
terrorism conviction, Justice Cameron Mander told the gunmen that his
crimes were so wicked that even if he was detained
until he died, it would not exhaust the requirements of
punishment and denunciation. The gunman lodged an appeal against his
conviction and sentencing in November twenty twenty two. But what
(08:50):
really motivated this Australian man to move to New Zealand
and commit this hate field crime is the story of
a lone wolf, a solo operator who'd been radicalized online,
A man who'd been so corrupted that his anger and
violence finally spilled over into the real world.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Really true.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
As the host of the Secrets We Keep Lone Actor podcast,
Joey Watson found out, the christ Church terrorist was far.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
From being alone.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
What we didn't know as he took those guns and
walked through those spaces held sacred by the Muslim community
of christ Church, he actually had hundreds of people with him.
Joey joins us now to talk about what he found
as he traced the movements of the christ Church terrorist
in the years before he ever stepped foot.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
On New Zealand soil.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Joey, thanks so much for joining us on True Crime
Conversations today. Your podcast is like chasing a ghost through
the internet, and it's really interesting to see what you
uncover as you try and track the final years and
months leading up to the christ Church terror attack in
(10:00):
twenty nineteen. I wanted to kick off with a question
that you seem to struggle with you yourself at the
start of all of this, which is and we up
to this point haven't mentioned the name of the terrorist yet,
and it's something that we have to question because how
much do you shine a light on someone who obviously
wanted to be in the spotlight for this particular purpose,
(10:22):
which is a mass shooting. But then how do you
discuss the story without saying his name at the same time,
how did you find that line between telling that story
and glorifying the man who did this terrible.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Thing in terms of naming him? I mean, I think
it sort of asks an even broader question around you
know why this story was worth doing, and whether it was,
and what decisions we made along the way to make
sure at every stage we tried to do it as
responsibly as possible, because you always run the risk of
amplifying terrorism. When christ Church happened, it was a day
(11:00):
that brought home this threat of right wing extremist terrorism
in the most unimaginedly tragic and horrible way. It happened
in a part of the world that no one could
have expected by someone in an Australia, the young Australian
guy from regional New South Wales, who you know, you
would never have expected to have committed something like that.
But very soon after it sort of seemed to disappear
(11:22):
from public view, I wanted to show to an Australian
audience that there was actually a lot more going on
here and we can't just kind of conveniently explain it
away as this loan hate field loaner. Soon after that
I sort of started speaking to members of the victim community,
and the victim community I found also, even though of
course there's a lot of diversity within the victim community
and within families about how this should be remembered and
(11:43):
how it should be contended with, but certainly that they
also had a lot of very important questions and felt
that there were things missing in terms of understanding how
this attack had come to be. And so that was
very much the spirit through which I engaged with this investigation.
The questions that I wanted to answer were the questions
of researchers that had been looking at this space for years,
(12:04):
and then also questions of the victim care communities still had.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So Australia needs to stand up and kind of take
responsibility for him.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Too, I think so. And also just sort of on
a more like kind of technical level, like when I
actually started writing the podcast, we did do versions of
it where we tried not to name him, you know,
gave him like sort of pseudonyms like the individual or
something like that. But it's sort of it had what
I kind of call like a Voldemort effect where it
ended up being maybe giving it more power than it
(12:34):
necessarily deserved. I mean, ultimately, this is not this podcast
is not a biography of him. It's you know, he
doesn't really have any agency in this story other than
an archive of his posts that helped to track out
his radicalization trajectory. He certainly doesn't have a voice as
far as I'm concerned. You know, he's he's a complete
and utter nonentity, And it's really about the worlds around
(12:57):
him and how he interacted with those worlds and how
I feel like those worlds have some at least philosophical
sociological culprit bild you in terms of creating what happened
on March fifteen, twenty nineteen, I'd.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Like you to take us back to twenty fourteen. First, so.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and I think it is easy
for us to forget what the climate was like across
those two years, and I mean, like politically across the world,
what was happening. But it was also there was a
lot happening on the Internet that maybe a lot of
us were aware of at the time because we might've
been in the world of Facebook, but there was all
(13:37):
these communities existing on websites like four chan and eight chan,
and these do play quite a big role in creating
what would become the christ Church terror attack in twenty nineteen.
So can you give us an idea first of all,
what the chans are and how they played a role.
And I'm going to name him a role in Brenton
(13:57):
Tarrence World back then.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
So the chans were something that went all the way
back to the early parts of the Internet. There what's
called an image board website. It was opted from a
Japanese model. The first one in the English speaking part
of the world was called four chan, and that started
in two thousand and four. Terrence's mum had said that
he'd been on the sites, you know, since he was ten,
which really would put him right there at the beginning
of the site beginning in the English speaking parts of
(14:21):
the world. At its heart, basically, it's just a place
to share pictures, memes, texts, particularly on topics like gaming, anime,
stuff like that, you know, things that were particularly of
interest to this subculture of young teenage and teenage boys
and young men at this point in time. But there
was one thing about four chan that made it particularly interesting,
(14:43):
which is that users did not have to share their identity,
so a lot of the interactions are done completely anonymously.
It's a kind of space of uninhibited anonymity, which in
the early years actually gave it a great sense of creativity.
So a lot of the memes that we see on
the Internet today actually come from those early days of
four Chan. But then there were things happening around four Chan,
(15:05):
and there was a a kind of group of websites.
But one imbit that became particularly important and particularly dark
was a was a sort of a web forum called
Iron March, which was extraordinarily terroristic and became more and
more terroristic in the lead in the years lead onto
christ Church. And they were like actively targeting four Chan,
recruiting members from four Chan, particularly from that twenty fourteen
(15:28):
twenty fifteen window, and you know, strategically sort of the
closer I looked at their propaganda is that you know,
they were trying finding ways to share material, share propaganda
that would really create one man army lone act of terrorism.
And you know, while it doesn't make christ Church look inevitable,
it certainly makes it look extremely explainable, especially when you
(15:51):
see how wildly close the lining up between that those
particular activities happening on four Chan and then Terence radicalization
trajectory actually are.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
That's what's happening around four Chan and the Internet, but
in the real world too, there are things happening which
is pushing these young men to become more radicalized. And
you know, there was incidents in twenty fourteen in Sydney.
You know, there was you know, a lot happening out
in the real world that was also pushing this really
anti Muslim agenda.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Absolutely, and I think like the three things really that
were happening creating this perfect storm at this period of
time where the migrant crisis in Europe became a mobilizing
issue for many people, it was being preyed upon by
far right actors to make it look like, you know,
Europe was in crisis, that traditional European ways of life
were being challenged. That coincided with the rise of Islamic state,
(16:42):
and that led to a spate of terror, you know,
seemingly interconnected to terror incidents in the West. And at
the same time we had this critical mass forming on
mainstream social media places like Facebook, and so this is
a kind of a whole separate ecosystem that I think
Tarrent was very much part of as well, which is
like in Australia, far at extremist groups. So for example,
(17:04):
the biggest one at the time was the United Patriots Front,
which seemed to have come from nowhere but was praying
on these things for propaganda, you know, a young guy
who became a mainstay of the Australian far right called
Black Patrelle started showing up at these big, big anti
Moss protests in Bendigo and basically taking over the movement.
But really what we see is that these guys were
(17:26):
using these you know, Islamophobia as a tool for recruitment,
as a mobilizing tool. In truth, they were Hitler worshiping,
race war wanting hardcore extremists, but it became a tool
to sort of hoover all these people up, bring them
into the movement, and then to radicalize them more and
(17:47):
more and more towards violence. And over the years after
that and the lead up to Christchurch, we get this
whole archive of posts that researchers had collected showing Tarent
engaging with groups like the United Patriots Front and its successor,
the Lad Society as well, you know, in very serious ways,
sort of you know, defending its leaders to people that
(18:07):
were threatening them, you know, encouraging its growth, sharing thoughts
on strategy, and then eventually, as we get closer to
it to the attack, also forecasting the violence that he
was going to commit to a very willing or an
audience that was very willing to listen.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Can you give us an idea of some of the
things that Tarrant was saying in some of his posts, Like,
because at some stage he's flipped from this conversations that
he's having with people because he wants to travel. He's
come into a bit of money, so he wants to
go to China and he's getting some references and it
all seems very innocent to say, within that radicalization window
that you discussed twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen, the conversations
(18:43):
he's having have changed dramatically.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
What kinds of things is he talking about?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yes, So we have a pretty sizable archive of posts
from across the years, and they come from everywhere, from
like Lonely Planet blogs, which like a travel book that
doesn't really exist anymore. He was posting on websites where
you asked for stock advice on how to invest in
the stock market, cryptocurrency websites, and then of course four Chad,
and then we have the posts I just mentioned in
(19:08):
the Australian extremist circles and we can kind of see
this process from where in the years twenty eleven, twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, he looks like a kind of very fairly normal,
likable guy, and that's consistent with the people that I
spoke to that knew him from that period. I mean,
he could be a bit of a menace. It was
known to be. He had experienced bullying at school, and
(19:29):
also a lot of traumer in his personal life, which
maybe we can talk about a bit later. Those are
the push factors, as opposed to the pool factors of medicalization,
which also play a role of course. But yeah, he's
talking about, you know, wanting to travel for the rest
of his life. He's asking for advice on his itinery.
The posts in many ways from myriad seem kind of
like full of hope, not necessarily any sign of darkness
(19:53):
or you know, right wing terrorism or anything that would
that it would soon develop into. And then it's it's
crazy how quickly it happens. We have from twenty fourteen
the middle of twenty fourteen, he's asking advice from for
an itinery for an upcoming trip that he would take
to the interior of China, amazing jam packed itinery. And
(20:14):
then by the middle of twenty fifteen he starts to
talk about things like race wars. He says comments like
violence is the last resort of a cornered animal. An
important moment that he was responding to those early in
those early race war posts was a shooting at a
black church in Charleston. A young guy had killed nine
(20:35):
worshippers who were in prayer in Charleston. He had, it
then turned out, had been posting on a website called
The Daily Stormer, which was one of these websites around
four chan that was kind of radicalizing four channers. Tarrant
had donated numerous times to that website using cryptocurrency, and
so he's defending Dylan Ruth. Soon after that, he's posting
(20:55):
pictures of white shooters and venerating them, and then it
seems to just kind of get darker and darker. He
starts to talk more about race wars. He starts to
talk about this fascist fantasy of the day of the rope.
By twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, this is a day
where everyone who was an in for the cause of
hardcore racism are basically executed, and it's become a big
part of neo Nazi and far right fantasy. And then
(21:19):
by twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, we can actually see
him kind of directly forecasting the violence that he's planning.
You know, he says, for example, that he's by this
stage moved to Duneden in New Zealand, and he's talking
about going to a gym and seeing in Islamic school
across the road from his gym, and how that would
be convenient because it would mean that the people would
(21:40):
all be gathering in one place, and you know, people
are supporting that idea, that's certainly no one's calling him
out for it. And then later on, you know, as
we get closer in twenty eighteen on four Chan, he's
talking about, you know, the mosques that he's going to attack.
He's outlining where the mosques are in christ Church. He
mentions the third mosque in Ashburton, which is where he
(22:04):
was on his way to before he was viewed off
the road police on the day of the attack. And yeah,
to an audience that is broadly supportive. And by looking
at sort of the relationship between his posts and the
people around him, you kind of get the sense of
a communal radicalization where people are desensitizing each other together
(22:27):
and then these sort of ultimate posts, the final post
actually happens on the day of the attack, where he
posts his manifesto and a link to the live stream
on a website called eight chan, which had become an
offshoot of four chan, which was somehow even more unhinged
by this stage, and he asks people to do their
part in sharing his propaganda, and they absolutely do. The
(22:47):
man the video the live stream had been up re
uploaded some like you know, thousands and thousands of times
I think YouTube recorded and new upload every second that
had to be taken down for twenty four hours after
the attack. The manifesto was translated into multiple languages. This
was a community. This was a community that from which
christ Church grew.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Can we talk about that community, because this is something
that I really found interesting in your investigation was this
ideology that seems to come from a man called James
Mason who wrote the book Siege, which is this idea
that the organized far right groups were failing in their targets,
(23:31):
and so there was this idea that instead it would
take individuals to do big gestures like the christ Church
incident in order for them to really start winning this
race war. And so, yes, there are communities out there,
and there does seem to be some leaders amongst these
communities too, but in essence they are and this is
(23:53):
mentioned in the podcast. They are centralized, but they are
decentralized in the fact that they are not part of
any particular group or movement. There's not one person in
charge of giving directives. They might be saying things that
are encouraging people to take their own actions, but what's
really difficult is that these are not organized like political
parties that you can hold accountable for the things that
(24:16):
its members does. There's this idea that it should be
an individual response to these situations.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, and I think it speaks to one of the
difficulties in defining, you know, what a terror organization is
and what a terror organization actually looks like in the
twenty first century, which is very different to what an
original conception might might be. James Mason was a neo Nazi,
a lifelong neo Nazi, going all the way back to
(24:45):
American Nazi movements like George Lincoln Rockwell, this kind of
famous cigar smoking guy who'd resurrected Hitlerrist ideas in the
US in the sixties after they'd been tabooed for twenty
years after the war, and by the eighties he'd become
extremely disillusioned with how the fascist movements in the US
were operating. Neo Nazi movements are extremely liable to be split,
(25:07):
so often leaders are assassinated by other members. You know,
nine times out of ten, when the neo Nazi leaders dies,
it's usually at the hands of someone within their own movement.
And so in the eighties he started to publish a
series of newsletters called Siege where he outlined this alternative vision,
which is that, you know, rather than trying to organize
(25:29):
cells that are so liable to be infiltrated and split,
you know, we should actually just have one man armies.
People should go out and plan and carry out terrorism
by themselves. When he eventually published that into a book
into the early nineties, and he had a bit of
a splash, but it didn't really go anywhere, And partly
that was because he ended up in prison for abusing
(25:52):
an ex partner of his who was a teenage girl.
He was a man in his late forties at this stage.
But then also because it faced some structural barriers. So
in the nineties, neo Nazis relied on groups to radicalize
new members to bring people into the movement, to spread
(26:12):
their vision, to be organized. There was no technology available
to be able to do it any other way. But
Mason at the time didn't predict the power of the Internet.
And what we see is after twenty years of obscurity,
when these forums are around eight chan that I'd mentioned
that one Iron March that I think plays a particularly
important role in the podcast people. In these forums, you
(26:34):
start to resurrect James Mason's ideas. I mean, Iron March
had become a place where a whole bunch of different
kind of hectic fascist literature had been discussed and explored.
There's a whole bunch of groups that are formed on
Iron March that at the time we had no idea
were interconnected. We didn't know until after. There was a
big leak actually after christ Church in November between nineteen
(26:56):
of all of Iron Marcher's messages and data going back
going back years pretty much into the beginning of the site.
It's now often referred to as the skull Mask Network.
When you look at how you know something like James
Mason was being reignited in this period, It's like, wow, okay, well,
you know christ Church is in so went many ways
explainable by James Mason and his theories and scattered throughout
(27:20):
the Manifesto of the christ Church Terrorists. And the manifesto
is a kind of complicated document with lots of different
references to lots of different subcultures, but unquestionably lines that
are directly inspired by James Mason and siege. James Mason
believed that if you had enough christ Church style terrorist
attacks carried out, you know, in a short period of time,
(27:41):
you trigger a reaction and opposition or reaction of violent reaction,
it would lead to some kind of war along racial lines,
and then eventually a race war, and then society would
collapse and from that a utopian whites only society would
be would be built. I mean, it's like totally airy, fairy,
pseudo religious insanity, but it was deeply held by a
(28:05):
lot of people all around the world and lead up
to christ Church, and I think unquestionably also by the
christ Church terrorist himself.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with investigative journalist and host of Secrets We
Keep Lone actor Joey Watson.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Up next.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Joey tells us what he discovered when he was tracking
Brenton Tarrant in the years leading up to his attack
on the mosques in Christchurch. Well, you were tracking Tarrant
not only on the Internet but in the real world
too in those years leading up to twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
And we know that he did quite a lot of travel.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I mean we knew that beforehand anyway, because he was
asking for reviews on things and posting his itineraries. But
through twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, he was traveling to
sort of a certain area of Europe frequently. Do we know, like,
do we know for sure what he was doing during
those trips.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I think that we have elements where I feel like
I have a clearer picture of what was going on
at that point, at these points in times, so Tarrant
had become by the day of the attack, obsessed with
an area of Europe known as the Balkans. The Balkans
is a place where people have in very recent history
killed for race and religion. People might be familiar with
(29:28):
the or remember the Balkan Wars of the nineties after
the fall of Yugoslavia the Bosnian which primarily took place
in Bosnia, where Serbian Christian Serbian forces and Croatian Catholic
forces targeted in many ways Bosniak Muslims and eventually committed
the only genocide in Europe since the Second World War
(29:50):
at Sebranitza. And it's very much an area of Europe
where things are still completely kind of divided along racial lines,
and in Serbia in particular, a lot of the people
that carried out those attacks were celebrated. When christ Church happened,
Tarrant had played a song venerating the perpetrator of the
man who would sort of go, who was now in
prison for carrying out that jedocide, had been responsible for
(30:12):
that jedocide at Cebriantis so radvan Krajitch. He also painted
the names of Serb war leaders on his guns in Cyrillic,
the traditional alphabet of Serbia and Eastern Europe. So the
fact that he had been there well on those two
separate troops here, but the fact that he'd been in
Serbia and Bosnia in twenty sixteen became of a focus
(30:35):
point for this investigation. And interestingly enough, while it was
very difficult to retrace exactly what he was doing at
that point in time, Serbian authorities were not particularly forthcoming.
This is where he'd actually emailed the Rifle Club, So
this is about two years before the attack. This is
where he emailed the Rifle Club in New Zealand asking
if they were taking members, which was his first step
(30:57):
in his mobilization towards violence. It was unclear how closely
that was linked to the setting in which it took
place until last year researchers at Auckland University unearthed a
whole bunch of new four Cham posts. They were made anonymously,
but they are with a high degree of certainty were
made by the terrorists. Where he is actually sort of
(31:19):
talking about being in the Balkans, that he claiming that
he was committing acts of violence while he was there
against Muslims, you know, for example, at a bar in Croatia.
And then he talks about wanting the reignition of the
Balkan Wars and that the reignition of another genocide, and
(31:39):
that he would be willing to fund four Chan users
if they sort of post a picture of him, of
themselves being able to fire a weapon to come to
the Balkans to help carry out that genocide. And people
are kind of largely very receptive to the receptive to it.
He's very specific in his claims as well. He says,
you know, he has a investment property which he would
(32:03):
sell to be able to carry it out. That's true.
He did have an investment property that he had with
his sister. So the level of specicificy is kind of
like deeply concerning and very confronting, and those are some
of the most confronting posts from the whole investigation. There
is a second Balkan trip then again, which happens just
months before the attack, and this time he goes to Bulgaria.
(32:24):
He does this sort of like nationalist ultra nationalist pilgrimage.
So Bulgaria is a country right in the southeast corner
of Europe, shares a border with Turkey, and for a
great deal of its history it had been occupied by
the Ottoman Empire, which was a Muslim empire, and the
Bulgarian Christian Bulgaria's kind of wars of resistance against the
(32:46):
Ottomans are a huge part of nationalist mythology, and scattered
throughout the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria are all these locations
celebrating those wars and tarent had left behind an ARCHI
facebook photos that sort of show that he had visited
a whole bunch of these places, and I followed in
his footsteps in Bulgaria. You know, while I don't want
to sort of be that journalist goes to another country
(33:07):
and starts, you know, judging it's it's it's politics anyway,
but you know, in terms of having explanatory power for
this story's I've never seen so many kind of swastikas
in my life. It's a country where a lot of
extremist groups in Western Europe do activities there because they
feel like they can get a more get away with
more there. The institutions are weaker compared to the rest
(33:28):
of Europe, but all of their propaganda, interestingly, was in English,
and I found out that they were regularly being visited
by far right extremists from Western Europe, for example. And yeah,
there's certainly a theory that this would have been the
reason of why Tarrant had become so obsessed with this
part of the world, and maybe that he'd even been
in contact with these groups and years leading up to
the attack. It certainly shows kind of just how much
(33:51):
more that was going on and things like Bulgaria, which
it first seems so random and obscure, started to make
a lot more sense.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
There is records of Tarrent donating to various far right figures.
One of those is Austrian muttin Zelna who he and
his girlfriend together do a lot of work in this
far right space. They have podcasts, they do a lot
of discussions with people around their belief systems, and we couldn't, well,
(34:19):
you couldn't prove that they actually met in person whilst
he was in Europe. But he would then become I believe,
the only person to be investigated in relation to the
shooting in christ Church outside of the New Zealand investigation
because of his potential links to Tarrant and potentially to
(34:40):
be motivating him to do what he did. How much
do we know about the relationship between those two and
just how close were they and could he have influenced
Tarran to do what he did?
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah? So. Martin Selmer is the leader of probably the
most prominent member of an organization called the Identitarian Movement,
which began in France around twenty ten and twenty eleven,
but slowly spread to Europe. In twenty seventeen and twenty
eighteen and then became the title of Tarence Manifesto. Right, so,
(35:13):
because of the the and Tarrent was certainly throughout the
manifesto obsessed with this theory, and that he propagated it
in himself. This meant that immediately after there was heaps
of commentary in the media about these crazy similarities between
the ideology of Martin Zelner and the ideology of the
christ Church terrorist and people wondered whether there were any links.
Very soon after that it became apparent that Tarrant had
(35:35):
donated a fairly large donation of about fifteen hundred dollars
to Martin Zelner. He then came under investigation. In the
course of that investigation, it was revealed he originally sort
of said that that was the extent of it, and
maybe that they'd exchanged an email, but in the course
of that investigation it came out that they'd actually she
had quite a comprehensive email exchange, that Tarrent had been
(35:59):
invited by Zelna to come and meet him for a
coffee or a beer if he was ever in Vienna,
and after the day after the last email had been
exchange between the two Tarrant had actually booked a higher
car for a trip to Vienna that he would take
after Bulgaria. So we're really talking, you know, just months,
really really, you know, weeks even before the attack, right
at the end of twenty eighteen. I think it's sort
of November twenty eighteen. Zelna obviously, like emphatically denies ever
(36:25):
having met with Tarran. I don't know whether during that
trip Zelna and Tarrant actually met. The record of Tarent's
time in Austria is extremely limited. I noticed the way
New Zealand investigated investigators talk about it in their report.
They they're kind of inconclusive. They say it's unlikely that
he would have met with Zelda because he wouldn't have quote,
(36:47):
wanted to withdraw at security attention to himself so close
to the attack. That may as well, that may well
be true.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Well, let's talk.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
About the month or two he spends in New Zealand
before the day he decides to live stream the attack
on those mosques.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
What was he doing in that time? You know, we
know that he has reached out to the rifle club.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
We know that he has learnt to shoot through a
game a friend of his who's gone shooting together. Like,
so we know that he's kind of prepping himself at
this stage, but what do we know about what he's
doing and saying online? Is he making it very clear
that he is about.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
To do what he's going to do.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I think that unquestionably he's forecasting the violence that he's
about to plan. I mean, we had this period leading
up to the attack where his real life world is
unquestionably extremely alone, but his online world seems to be
quite engaged and grown.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Because his apartment is like bear right, he's barely got
any furniture in his apartment.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
He's living a very like scant.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, it's extremely scant, and I mean he so the
move to New Zealand, you know, originally was one of
those things that seemed kind of like just random, especially
because it was to Duneed And I mean maybe if
he'd gone to Auckland it would have made more sense,
but he had no family connections in Duneed, you know.
But now that we know that his radicalization trajectory and
(38:09):
that he had already been resolving towards violence for years
before that, it starts to look more like a strategic decision. Right,
this was something that he would do because he knew
that he would have more lenient gun laws there. He
had a friend that he'd met gaming in Waikato at
the other end of the country that assisted him in
getting his gun license. He became his referee, and the
(38:31):
father of this gaming friend became Tarent's second referee, and
this was within weeks of him arriving in New Zealand.
He'd already applied for his gun license. He then regularly trained,
he went to the gym. He didn't have much of
an online social he didn't have much of a real
social life whatsoever. You know, as you said, there was
not much even furniture in his apartment, but there was
(38:52):
a computer and so much of the social engagement that
we see in that period leading out to the attack,
that's where that happened, including that forecasting of violence. So
the main events that we have in Tarren's life, things
like at one stage he at the end of twenty seventeen,
he injures himself when he's cleaning his rifle and he
has to present to hospital to get his eye fixed
(39:14):
because of injuries that he'd sustained in that moment in time,
he also has to go to hospital another period for
steroid use. He'd been abusing steroids, it seemed, and that
was his second presentation. These are the nature of his
social interaction. They all seem to revolve around something to
do with the attack in January. On I think the
twelfth of January, he'd taken a trip to christ Church
(39:36):
where he conducted surveillance of the mosque. He'd phone a
drone over the mosque to sort of work out how
he was going to carry out the attack, and otherwise
he was just sort of meticulously training. I mean, he
was in many ways the realization, the ultimate realization of
what James Mason had predicted and asked for and what
(39:58):
these groups were calling for as of a one man army.
This was coordinated lone actor terrorism.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Then he makes a fine call the night before the attack,
calls his mum and she even she says that phone
call wasn't quite right.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, that's right. His mum told Australian investigators that he'd
said that he loved her, which is not something he
said very often. And you know, I try, I try
in this sort of investigation to focus on the worlds
around Tarent and not him so much specifically but you know,
certainly there is a kind of element of like deep
dark tragedy in that moment in time, because Yeah, then
(40:38):
the next day he goes and sort of carries out
the unimaginable, unimaginable that had been a consequence of worlds
that his mom certainly wouldn't have known about her understood,
worlds that most Australians certainly wouldn't have known about or understood.
And I think that's why we kind of came to
see him as being completely alone, because they were so
(40:59):
invisible to everyone else around him.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Next, I asked Joy about the manifesto that Arrant published
online on the day of the attack and the dangerous
repercussions of it being made available to the internet. As
you mentioned, he published his manifesto online on the day
of the attack. He also emailed it to then Prime
Minister Jacinda Arderne's office. We kind of understand what the
(41:27):
manifesto included, but where does that exist now?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Once you put something on.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The Internet, it's generally there forever, and as you mentioned,
it was translated into a bunch of different languages, It
was shared far and wide across the world. Can you
ever remove something like that? From the Internet.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Yeah, I think it's important to say as well that
he had been not only strategic in the way that
he committed the violence, but I'd argue even more strategic
in the way that he created his propaganda in order
for this to become an inspirational act of terrorism. Right,
he'd live stream the attack, He'd created a manifesto that
(42:04):
was deliberately targeted to the multiple communities that he was
operating in, things that made him look kind of insane
to people that were outside those communities, that made kind
of complete sense to people that were on eight chan.
It was full of in jokes and then of course
references to some of the darkest stuff like the James
Mason stuff that we had spoken about. But you know,
through the live stream, which he knew would be proliferated
(42:27):
through the Internet by by eight chan, as by and
people in the other extremist forums around eight chan. He
knew that it would be share thousands and thousands of times.
He'd done that thing of you know, that that thing
that inspirational terrorists tried to do, which is to create
terrorism that looks like theater, that something that can be
consumed not so different to the spectacle of having planes
fly into the World Trade Center. You know, it's not
(42:50):
just about the damage that's inflicted on the people that
are in the towers, and it's not just about you know,
the fifty one dead and all of the injured, including
you know, children as young as three and four that
are shot on that day in the mosques. It's also
you know, about creating the spectacle, the inspirational spectacle for
people to consume it and to you know, hopefully or
(43:11):
his hope is that they would then kind of carry
it on. And that is certainly absolutely what we've seen.
It's interesting that Australia as Australia sort of had this
collective amnesia around the event, as we sort of forget,
for tried to forget that it had ever happened. People
in this community became obsessed with it. Very soon after,
there was a shift away from some of these forums
(43:34):
onto a new space called Telegram. I think christ Church
was really important in that because you know, it was
clear that that they weren't going to be tenable for
much longer, and they were right. For example, eight Chan,
the company cloud Fare that provided the web infrastructure for it,
stopped doing that by August that year, and so a
lot of these people moved to a different messaging platform
called Telegram, which is owned by this Russian tech billionaire
(43:58):
Pavel du supposedly has fathered two hundred kids around the world.
He is like a pro natalist guy, and he he'd
set up Telegram deliberately to be unsubpoenable, like it's the
Shell companies. Within Shell companies, it's registered in the British
Virgin Islands and Dubai, and within those websites, you know,
a new network kind of formed called Terragram that was
(44:21):
very much relied on what happened in christ Church as
a core part of its propaganda. So they created a,
for example, a pantheon of saints. This is something that
Islamic extremists had had the wide extremists had not yet had,
which was a culture of martyrdom. Tarrant was seen very much,
along with Anders Bravict for the Oslo terrorist as the
(44:42):
original state in the pantheon, and it encouraged other users
to carry out similar acts in order to be added
to this pantheon, you know, to be venerated and respected
by this community. And that absolutely happened. So it's It's
wild how Tarrent was both a kind of a product
of the propaganda in these communities, but then he also
became propaganda in him in himself.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
The whole purpose of your podcast is to show that
whilst we see Tarrent as a lone terrorist, as someone
who did this purely off their own back, that in reality,
he had hundreds, if not thousands of people with him
that day. There were those who had that link and
watch that live stream. There were those who had helped
(45:26):
radicalize him, who had even down to showing him how
to modify the weapons that he used on that day.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Do we then presume that when we see any.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
Other reports of loan terror attacks or loan gunmen, or
someone who acts seemingly off their own back, that potentially
there's always a community of thousands involved in that person planning, creating, training,
and then taking actual action in the real world.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
I don't think so. I think there definitely are actors
of that. There definitely are instances where violence is truly
sort of committed on a loan actor level. Right For example,
I would say it would be difficult to pin the
bond a junction stabbing to any sort of larger ideology
in the same way. I think the Port Arthur massacre, right,
this was a guy that was had a long history
(46:19):
of being psychologically disturbed. He wasn't connected to any broader ecosystem.
But I think what we're talking about is is a
specific subsection of mash shooters, which is you know, far
right terrorism. And I think in those cases it's becoming
increasingly clear that they are borrowing from a deeper ideology.
(46:40):
And it's always an extremely difficult thing to know, you know,
in the black box of the human mind, where the
ideology begins and where the proclivity to violence or the well,
you know what researchers would call the pool factors, the
push factors towards extremism begin. But I think in this
case specifically, and indeed I think in definitely in other cases,
(47:03):
the explanatory value of those communities, like they it's pretty
much undeniable. But yeah, it's really difficult, and it's becoming
more and I think it's becoming more and more difficult.
Like going back to that terogram designation last week, right,
Like we used to have a clear kind of sense
of what a terrorist organization looked like and in the
(47:23):
period leading up to christ Church it kind of starts
to break down. I mean, we mentioned how one of
the former members of Adam Woffin told me how the
group was centralized but also decentralized. So they did have
something that looked like that, Like they did train together,
they did create propaganda strategically, they did kind of organize
a little bit across state lines in the US and
a little bit in Australia. But also the purpose of
the group was to go beyond the group. It was
(47:44):
it was really to inspire people to go, you know,
to use their language. Guns are blazing, even if that
meant on the other side of the world. And then
now it's become sort of even more and morphous. We
have a thing like like terogram. All it really is
is like a bunch of chats like it's it really
is like a bunch of chats that you can kind
(48:05):
of access on your smart It has no discernible leadership structure.
I mean, there have been some people that have arrested
for particular incitements to violence, but it doesn't have any
discernible leadership structure. It's not even clear you know, what
is a specific terogram chat and what isn't. And now
we're saying, you know that in Australia people could be
charged for up to twenty five years in jail for
(48:25):
being a member of Terogram. But you know, I wonder
and it really is interesting that happened last week because
it speaks to the kind of complexity of this loan
actor thing. It's like, well, you know, what does it
mean to be a member of Tereogram. I mean, there
are a bunch of chats you know, on your on
your smartphone, so.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
And there's a bunch of researchers and journalists and all
kinds of people.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Sure, sure, yeah, we hope. I mean that's why. Yeah,
And I guess that goes back to your question before.
It's like, you know, as a researcher, I do infiltrate
this base, So I do have you know, pseudonyms that
I use on these sites. And it is alarming how
kind of easy it is still now to be able
to access so terror related material, you know, just like
(49:04):
you know, right now, I could do it right now,
sittings sitting across from you. So yeah, it's a really
it's a really difficult environment. And I don't envy the
role that intelligence agencies need to play in trying to
monitor this space. It certainly is not nothing like what
it used to be.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
I think many of us are familiar with what happened
on that day in twenty nineteen. I mean some people
have even seen it, having seen the live stream. I've
never actually looked at it. We know that more than
fifty people died that day, and potentially could have been more.
As you mentioned, he was intercepted potentially on his way
to a third mosque when he was run off the
(49:41):
road by police. But do you think a lot of
lessons were learned after that day? I mean it definitely
rocked New Zealand to its core because it was so
unexpected and they weren't aware at you know, Tarrent having
potentially taken advantage of their lax gun laws compared to Australia,
for example, So there was a Royal commission, there were
(50:02):
changes to gun laws. Do you think the things that
happened in the wake of that christ Church attack have
gone any ways to potentially stopping it from happening again?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
I really hope. So. I worry about the fact that
Australia had distanced itself so much from the attack, and
the fact that it happened in New Zealand meant that
New Zealand agencies really had to bear the brunt of
responsibility for the attack, and so much of the analysis
that's publicly available is about their role, you know, what
they had missed. But really, you know, New Zealand was
(50:33):
the setting, but actually had very very little to do
with what happened in christ Church.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
They were just the last destination.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
There were the last destination and gun laws and an
exception to that, and just sinda Idern sort of like Howard.
John Howard had after Poort Arthur passed gun law reform
to make it more difficult to access things like semi
automatic weapons in New Zealand, and those I mean apparently
are being contested in New Zealand Parliament now and there
are people who who you know, as they often are
with gun legislation, it has become you know, within the
(51:04):
realm of controversial unfortunate. But in Australia, like I don't know,
there wasn't much of a response, both socially and culturally
as we said, but also in institutionally. I mean, we
never had an inquiry here as to what had led
him to violence. I mean, it's a societal wide problem
and something that I think will need to be addressed.
(51:26):
And while I sincerely hope that something like christ Church
would never happen again, I think there's a lot of
feeling within the community that within the research community specifically
that christ Church wouldn't might not necessarily be the last
time something like this happens, and I just hope that
we're in a position to be able to stop it
(51:47):
before it does.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Thank you to Joey for helping us tell this story today.
There's a link to his podcast, Loan Actor in the
show notes. True Crime Conversations is a podcast hosted by
me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio
designed by Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. It's a Friday
afternoon in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Families are
exchanging warm greetings at the Alnor Mosque while their children
laugh and play in the foyer. Today, around one hundred
(00:26):
and ninety worshippers have gathered preparing to kneel for Jimua,
the most sacred prayer of the Muslim week. The atmosphere
is peaceful, it's serene. Few could have imagined just how
quickly that peace would descend into unspeakable horror. Just outside,
on the quiet suburban road, a man pulls into the
(00:47):
driveway next to the mosque. He's alone, dressed in camouflage
and a tactical vest with ammunition magazines strapped to his waist.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He'd also attached.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
A go pro camera to his helmet, and from that
he would start streaming live on Facebook. Hello, lads, he says,
let's get this party started.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
You can see his.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Hands on the wheel before he turns to the passenger seat.
On it is sitting several guns. They're marked with white lettering.
Now these words wouldn't make much sense to those of
us who can't read syrillic script, but for the families
of people who'd survived a genocide in Europe decades before,
it would be a shock. In the boot of the car,
next to some plastic shopping bags and some red fuel cans,
(01:31):
sits yet more guns. You see him reach for a
bluetooth speaker, pressing buttons to start playing a song, and
the jaunty accordion music that then filters out through the
car covers up the darkness of the lyrics. He'd already
been listening to several songs on the drive in Serbia,
Strong and anti Muslim track and the British Grenadiers, a
(01:51):
traditional British military march. At exactly one thirty nine pm,
he steps out of the car, heavily armed, and walks
towards the mosque. He ignores the three people who walk
past him on the street. They aren't his target. Instead,
we follow his camo clad gloves holding his rifle around
a corner towards the mosque.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
We watch on as he approaches.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
The first victim, a worshipper, who greets him with a
polite hello, brother. Just as without warning, the man behind
the camera raises his shotgun and opens fire, killing four
people on the spot. He throws that shotgun to the
ground and grabs his semi automatic AR fifteen, killing two
more men in the hallway near the entrance. He's attached
(02:35):
a strobe light to the gun and it disorientates the victims,
so in the main hall, which is packed with worshipers
with nowhere to go, he would then mow down dozens
of people where they knelt. He shoots at every person
he sees, as well as into the side rooms as
he passes. Worshippers can be seen scrambling for cover, trying
(02:55):
to shield their loved ones, searching for exits as panic
tears through the building. Amid the chaos, though there are
moments of extraordinary bravery. Naim Rashid ran towards the attacker
in a desperate attempt to stop him, an act of
courage that would cost him his life and earn him
a posthumous bravery award. Just two minutes into the attack,
(03:17):
people start calling police. The gunman moves outside. He's still
firing off rounds, but he's returned to his car to
retrieve another gun. He then heads back through the mosque
southern gate, killing two people who've tried to hide behind
the cars. He goes back inside the building, shooting dead
those he'd previously wounded. After six harrowing minutes, the gunman
(03:39):
returns to his car again, and this time he drives away,
running over the body of a woman he'd killed as
he fires shots out the window at worshipers running from
the horror behind his fleeing vehicle. Is a scene of
utter chaos. The cries of the wounded would mix in
with the sounds of sirens as police finally arrive, not
(04:00):
realizing that the car holding the man they wanted to
stop was leaving just as they pulled up up, their
view of him obscured by a passing bus. But the
rampage doesn't end there. Speeding through christ Church's streets at
over one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, weaving through
lanes and into oncoming traffic, the government makes his way
(04:21):
to the Linwood Islamic Center. Now the live stream ends here.
The connection to Facebook interrupted right before the attacker aims
a shotgun at the driver of another vehicle, pulling the
trigger twice, but it fails to fire both times. While
the live stream has ended, the GoPro continues to record,
(04:42):
so at one fifty two PM, it captures the very
moment he pulls into the driveway outside the Linwood Building,
where around one hundred people are beginning their prayers. He
blocks the entrance to the car park so no one
can leave. He again steps out and opens fire, but
unable to initially find the front door, he instead shoots
those who are still outside and into the building through
(05:04):
the windows as he grabs yet another gun from his car.
Abdul Aziz Wahabzadah runs outside and throws a payment terminal
at him in an attempt to stop the violence. The
gunman fires back but misses. Aziz picks up an empty
shotgun that's been thrown to the ground, and taking cover
amongst the nearby cars, he yells out his location, attempting
(05:28):
to draw the man to him and away from the building.
His valiant efforts, however, fail, and the armed man enters
the center, shooting and killing three more people. As he
emerges from the building, Aziz confronts him again. The man
pulls a bayonet from his vest, but instead of attacking Aziz,
he returns to his car, and just four minutes.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
After his arrival drives away.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
By this stage, police now have a description of the vehicle.
The two thousand and five Subaru outback was spotted by
a police unit, which then rammed the vehicle off the road.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Now the man would later admit there was actually on.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
His way to his third target, another mosque in Ashburton's
southwest of Christchurch. In just thirty six minutes, fifty one
people were killed, the oldest victim seventy seven, the youngest
just three, as eighty nine others lay wounded in what
would become New Zealand's darkest day, a moment of profound
(06:28):
grief and loss, witnessed not only by those who were
there that day, but by the entire world, all of
it live streamed. Thirty six minutes of horror, much of
it broadcast in real time, with people watching across the globe.
Now some felt helpless as that violence unfolded, desperate but
(06:48):
unable to intervene as innocent men, women and children fell
to the gunman's bullets, but not all of them. I'm
Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast
exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the
(07:09):
people who know the most about them. When the gunmen
arrived in court, he smiled at the collection of journalists
sent to cover the case, making an inverted okay gesture
with his hand, said to be a symbol for white supremacy.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Over the course of his trial, where he was.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Charged with fifty one counts of murder, forty of attempted murder,
and engaging in a terrorist act, a psychiatric assessment would
find he was of sound mind. He sent seven letters
during this time, one of them, addressed to Allan in Russia,
ended up posted on both the four chan and eight
chan websites. The six page letter, written in pencil on
(07:45):
a small notepad, mainly speaks of memories of his trip
to Russia in twenty fifteen, thanking his supporter for the
postage stamps he'd sent in order for him to be
able to correspond with him. He admits he can't go
into any detail about any regrets or feelings he has
about his situation, as the guards would just confiscate the letter,
but it ended with a statement that a great conflict
(08:06):
was and used language that could be raided as inciting
his supporters to violence. He would at one stage dismiss
his lawyers, deciding to represent himself and pleading guilty to
all ninety two charges. His sentencing was televised, the judge
informing him that he would be sentenced to life in
prison without the possibility of parole, New Zealand's first ever
(08:28):
terrorism conviction, Justice Cameron Mander told the gunmen that his
crimes were so wicked that even if he was detained
until he died, it would not exhaust the requirements of
punishment and denunciation. The gunman lodged an appeal against his
conviction and sentencing in November twenty twenty two. But what
(08:50):
really motivated this Australian man to move to New Zealand
and commit this hate field crime is the story of
a lone wolf, a solo operator who'd been radicalized online,
A man who'd been so corrupted that his anger and
violence finally spilled over into the real world.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Really true.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
As the host of the Secrets We Keep Lone Actor podcast,
Joey Watson found out, the christ Church terrorist was far.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
From being alone.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
What we didn't know as he took those guns and
walked through those spaces held sacred by the Muslim community
of christ Church, he actually had hundreds of people with him.
Joey joins us now to talk about what he found
as he traced the movements of the christ Church terrorist
in the years before he ever stepped foot.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
On New Zealand soil.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Joey, thanks so much for joining us on True Crime
Conversations today. Your podcast is like chasing a ghost through
the internet, and it's really interesting to see what you
uncover as you try and track the final years and
months leading up to the christ Church terror attack in
(10:00):
twenty nineteen. I wanted to kick off with a question
that you seem to struggle with you yourself at the
start of all of this, which is and we up
to this point haven't mentioned the name of the terrorist yet,
and it's something that we have to question because how
much do you shine a light on someone who obviously
wanted to be in the spotlight for this particular purpose,
(10:22):
which is a mass shooting. But then how do you
discuss the story without saying his name at the same time,
how did you find that line between telling that story
and glorifying the man who did this terrible.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Thing in terms of naming him? I mean, I think
it sort of asks an even broader question around you
know why this story was worth doing, and whether it was,
and what decisions we made along the way to make
sure at every stage we tried to do it as
responsibly as possible, because you always run the risk of
amplifying terrorism. When christ Church happened, it was a day
(11:00):
that brought home this threat of right wing extremist terrorism
in the most unimaginedly tragic and horrible way. It happened
in a part of the world that no one could
have expected by someone in an Australia, the young Australian
guy from regional New South Wales, who you know, you
would never have expected to have committed something like that.
But very soon after it sort of seemed to disappear
(11:22):
from public view, I wanted to show to an Australian
audience that there was actually a lot more going on
here and we can't just kind of conveniently explain it
away as this loan hate field loaner. Soon after that
I sort of started speaking to members of the victim community,
and the victim community I found also, even though of
course there's a lot of diversity within the victim community
and within families about how this should be remembered and
(11:43):
how it should be contended with, but certainly that they
also had a lot of very important questions and felt
that there were things missing in terms of understanding how
this attack had come to be. And so that was
very much the spirit through which I engaged with this investigation.
The questions that I wanted to answer were the questions
of researchers that had been looking at this space for years,
(12:04):
and then also questions of the victim care communities still had.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So Australia needs to stand up and kind of take
responsibility for him.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Too, I think so. And also just sort of on
a more like kind of technical level, like when I
actually started writing the podcast, we did do versions of
it where we tried not to name him, you know,
gave him like sort of pseudonyms like the individual or
something like that. But it's sort of it had what
I kind of call like a Voldemort effect where it
ended up being maybe giving it more power than it
(12:34):
necessarily deserved. I mean, ultimately, this is not this podcast
is not a biography of him. It's you know, he
doesn't really have any agency in this story other than
an archive of his posts that helped to track out
his radicalization trajectory. He certainly doesn't have a voice as
far as I'm concerned. You know, he's he's a complete
and utter nonentity, And it's really about the worlds around
(12:57):
him and how he interacted with those worlds and how
I feel like those worlds have some at least philosophical
sociological culprit bild you in terms of creating what happened
on March fifteen, twenty nineteen, I'd.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Like you to take us back to twenty fourteen. First, so.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and I think it is easy
for us to forget what the climate was like across
those two years, and I mean, like politically across the world,
what was happening. But it was also there was a
lot happening on the Internet that maybe a lot of
us were aware of at the time because we might've
been in the world of Facebook, but there was all
(13:37):
these communities existing on websites like four chan and eight chan,
and these do play quite a big role in creating
what would become the christ Church terror attack in twenty nineteen.
So can you give us an idea first of all,
what the chans are and how they played a role.
And I'm going to name him a role in Brenton
(13:57):
Tarrence World back then.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
So the chans were something that went all the way
back to the early parts of the Internet. There what's
called an image board website. It was opted from a
Japanese model. The first one in the English speaking part
of the world was called four chan, and that started
in two thousand and four. Terrence's mum had said that
he'd been on the sites, you know, since he was ten,
which really would put him right there at the beginning
of the site beginning in the English speaking parts of
(14:21):
the world. At its heart, basically, it's just a place
to share pictures, memes, texts, particularly on topics like gaming, anime,
stuff like that, you know, things that were particularly of
interest to this subculture of young teenage and teenage boys
and young men at this point in time. But there
was one thing about four chan that made it particularly interesting,
(14:43):
which is that users did not have to share their identity,
so a lot of the interactions are done completely anonymously.
It's a kind of space of uninhibited anonymity, which in
the early years actually gave it a great sense of creativity.
So a lot of the memes that we see on
the Internet today actually come from those early days of
four Chan. But then there were things happening around four Chan,
(15:05):
and there was a a kind of group of websites.
But one imbit that became particularly important and particularly dark
was a was a sort of a web forum called
Iron March, which was extraordinarily terroristic and became more and
more terroristic in the lead in the years lead onto
christ Church. And they were like actively targeting four Chan,
recruiting members from four Chan, particularly from that twenty fourteen
(15:28):
twenty fifteen window, and you know, strategically sort of the
closer I looked at their propaganda is that you know,
they were trying finding ways to share material, share propaganda
that would really create one man army lone act of terrorism.
And you know, while it doesn't make christ Church look inevitable,
it certainly makes it look extremely explainable, especially when you
(15:51):
see how wildly close the lining up between that those
particular activities happening on four Chan and then Terence radicalization
trajectory actually are.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
That's what's happening around four Chan and the Internet, but
in the real world too, there are things happening which
is pushing these young men to become more radicalized. And
you know, there was incidents in twenty fourteen in Sydney.
You know, there was you know, a lot happening out
in the real world that was also pushing this really
anti Muslim agenda.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Absolutely, and I think like the three things really that
were happening creating this perfect storm at this period of
time where the migrant crisis in Europe became a mobilizing
issue for many people, it was being preyed upon by
far right actors to make it look like, you know,
Europe was in crisis, that traditional European ways of life
were being challenged. That coincided with the rise of Islamic state,
(16:42):
and that led to a spate of terror, you know,
seemingly interconnected to terror incidents in the West. And at
the same time we had this critical mass forming on
mainstream social media places like Facebook, and so this is
a kind of a whole separate ecosystem that I think
Tarrent was very much part of as well, which is
like in Australia, far at extremist groups. So for example,
(17:04):
the biggest one at the time was the United Patriots Front,
which seemed to have come from nowhere but was praying
on these things for propaganda, you know, a young guy
who became a mainstay of the Australian far right called
Black Patrelle started showing up at these big, big anti
Moss protests in Bendigo and basically taking over the movement.
But really what we see is that these guys were
(17:26):
using these you know, Islamophobia as a tool for recruitment,
as a mobilizing tool. In truth, they were Hitler worshiping,
race war wanting hardcore extremists, but it became a tool
to sort of hoover all these people up, bring them
into the movement, and then to radicalize them more and
(17:47):
more and more towards violence. And over the years after
that and the lead up to Christchurch, we get this
whole archive of posts that researchers had collected showing Tarent
engaging with groups like the United Patriots Front and its successor,
the Lad Society as well, you know, in very serious ways,
sort of you know, defending its leaders to people that
(18:07):
were threatening them, you know, encouraging its growth, sharing thoughts
on strategy, and then eventually, as we get closer to
it to the attack, also forecasting the violence that he
was going to commit to a very willing or an
audience that was very willing to listen.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Can you give us an idea of some of the
things that Tarrant was saying in some of his posts, Like,
because at some stage he's flipped from this conversations that
he's having with people because he wants to travel. He's
come into a bit of money, so he wants to
go to China and he's getting some references and it
all seems very innocent to say, within that radicalization window
that you discussed twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen, the conversations
(18:43):
he's having have changed dramatically.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
What kinds of things is he talking about?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yes, So we have a pretty sizable archive of posts
from across the years, and they come from everywhere, from
like Lonely Planet blogs, which like a travel book that
doesn't really exist anymore. He was posting on websites where
you asked for stock advice on how to invest in
the stock market, cryptocurrency websites, and then of course four Chad,
and then we have the posts I just mentioned in
(19:08):
the Australian extremist circles and we can kind of see
this process from where in the years twenty eleven, twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen, he looks like a kind of very fairly normal,
likable guy, and that's consistent with the people that I
spoke to that knew him from that period. I mean,
he could be a bit of a menace. It was
known to be. He had experienced bullying at school, and
(19:29):
also a lot of traumer in his personal life, which
maybe we can talk about a bit later. Those are
the push factors, as opposed to the pool factors of medicalization,
which also play a role of course. But yeah, he's
talking about, you know, wanting to travel for the rest
of his life. He's asking for advice on his itinery.
The posts in many ways from myriad seem kind of
like full of hope, not necessarily any sign of darkness
(19:53):
or you know, right wing terrorism or anything that would
that it would soon develop into. And then it's it's
crazy how quickly it happens. We have from twenty fourteen
the middle of twenty fourteen, he's asking advice from for
an itinery for an upcoming trip that he would take
to the interior of China, amazing jam packed itinery. And
(20:14):
then by the middle of twenty fifteen he starts to
talk about things like race wars. He says comments like
violence is the last resort of a cornered animal. An
important moment that he was responding to those early in
those early race war posts was a shooting at a
black church in Charleston. A young guy had killed nine
(20:35):
worshippers who were in prayer in Charleston. He had, it
then turned out, had been posting on a website called
The Daily Stormer, which was one of these websites around
four chan that was kind of radicalizing four channers. Tarrant
had donated numerous times to that website using cryptocurrency, and
so he's defending Dylan Ruth. Soon after that, he's posting
(20:55):
pictures of white shooters and venerating them, and then it
seems to just kind of get darker and darker. He
starts to talk more about race wars. He starts to
talk about this fascist fantasy of the day of the rope.
By twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, this is a day
where everyone who was an in for the cause of
hardcore racism are basically executed, and it's become a big
part of neo Nazi and far right fantasy. And then
(21:19):
by twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, we can actually see
him kind of directly forecasting the violence that he's planning.
You know, he says, for example, that he's by this
stage moved to Duneden in New Zealand, and he's talking
about going to a gym and seeing in Islamic school
across the road from his gym, and how that would
be convenient because it would mean that the people would
(21:40):
all be gathering in one place, and you know, people
are supporting that idea, that's certainly no one's calling him
out for it. And then later on, you know, as
we get closer in twenty eighteen on four Chan, he's
talking about, you know, the mosques that he's going to attack.
He's outlining where the mosques are in christ Church. He
mentions the third mosque in Ashburton, which is where he
(22:04):
was on his way to before he was viewed off
the road police on the day of the attack. And yeah,
to an audience that is broadly supportive. And by looking
at sort of the relationship between his posts and the
people around him, you kind of get the sense of
a communal radicalization where people are desensitizing each other together
(22:27):
and then these sort of ultimate posts, the final post
actually happens on the day of the attack, where he
posts his manifesto and a link to the live stream
on a website called eight chan, which had become an
offshoot of four chan, which was somehow even more unhinged
by this stage, and he asks people to do their
part in sharing his propaganda, and they absolutely do. The
(22:47):
man the video the live stream had been up re
uploaded some like you know, thousands and thousands of times
I think YouTube recorded and new upload every second that
had to be taken down for twenty four hours after
the attack. The manifesto was translated into multiple languages. This
was a community. This was a community that from which
christ Church grew.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Can we talk about that community, because this is something
that I really found interesting in your investigation was this
ideology that seems to come from a man called James
Mason who wrote the book Siege, which is this idea
that the organized far right groups were failing in their targets,
(23:31):
and so there was this idea that instead it would
take individuals to do big gestures like the christ Church
incident in order for them to really start winning this
race war. And so, yes, there are communities out there,
and there does seem to be some leaders amongst these
communities too, but in essence they are and this is
(23:53):
mentioned in the podcast. They are centralized, but they are
decentralized in the fact that they are not part of
any particular group or movement. There's not one person in
charge of giving directives. They might be saying things that
are encouraging people to take their own actions, but what's
really difficult is that these are not organized like political
parties that you can hold accountable for the things that
(24:16):
its members does. There's this idea that it should be
an individual response to these situations.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, and I think it speaks to one of the
difficulties in defining, you know, what a terror organization is
and what a terror organization actually looks like in the
twenty first century, which is very different to what an
original conception might might be. James Mason was a neo Nazi,
a lifelong neo Nazi, going all the way back to
(24:45):
American Nazi movements like George Lincoln Rockwell, this kind of
famous cigar smoking guy who'd resurrected Hitlerrist ideas in the
US in the sixties after they'd been tabooed for twenty
years after the war, and by the eighties he'd become
extremely disillusioned with how the fascist movements in the US
were operating. Neo Nazi movements are extremely liable to be split,
(25:07):
so often leaders are assassinated by other members. You know,
nine times out of ten, when the neo Nazi leaders dies,
it's usually at the hands of someone within their own movement.
And so in the eighties he started to publish a
series of newsletters called Siege where he outlined this alternative vision,
which is that, you know, rather than trying to organize
(25:29):
cells that are so liable to be infiltrated and split,
you know, we should actually just have one man armies.
People should go out and plan and carry out terrorism
by themselves. When he eventually published that into a book
into the early nineties, and he had a bit of
a splash, but it didn't really go anywhere, And partly
that was because he ended up in prison for abusing
(25:52):
an ex partner of his who was a teenage girl.
He was a man in his late forties at this stage.
But then also because it faced some structural barriers. So
in the nineties, neo Nazis relied on groups to radicalize
new members to bring people into the movement, to spread
(26:12):
their vision, to be organized. There was no technology available
to be able to do it any other way. But
Mason at the time didn't predict the power of the Internet.
And what we see is after twenty years of obscurity,
when these forums are around eight chan that I'd mentioned
that one Iron March that I think plays a particularly
important role in the podcast people. In these forums, you
(26:34):
start to resurrect James Mason's ideas. I mean, Iron March
had become a place where a whole bunch of different
kind of hectic fascist literature had been discussed and explored.
There's a whole bunch of groups that are formed on
Iron March that at the time we had no idea
were interconnected. We didn't know until after. There was a
big leak actually after christ Church in November between nineteen
(26:56):
of all of Iron Marcher's messages and data going back
going back years pretty much into the beginning of the site.
It's now often referred to as the skull Mask Network.
When you look at how you know something like James
Mason was being reignited in this period, It's like, wow, okay, well,
you know christ Church is in so went many ways
explainable by James Mason and his theories and scattered throughout
(27:20):
the Manifesto of the christ Church Terrorists. And the manifesto
is a kind of complicated document with lots of different
references to lots of different subcultures, but unquestionably lines that
are directly inspired by James Mason and siege. James Mason
believed that if you had enough christ Church style terrorist
attacks carried out, you know, in a short period of time,
(27:41):
you trigger a reaction and opposition or reaction of violent reaction,
it would lead to some kind of war along racial lines,
and then eventually a race war, and then society would
collapse and from that a utopian whites only society would
be would be built. I mean, it's like totally airy, fairy,
pseudo religious insanity, but it was deeply held by a
(28:05):
lot of people all around the world and lead up
to christ Church, and I think unquestionably also by the
christ Church terrorist himself.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.
I'm speaking with investigative journalist and host of Secrets We
Keep Lone actor Joey Watson.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Up next.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Joey tells us what he discovered when he was tracking
Brenton Tarrant in the years leading up to his attack
on the mosques in Christchurch. Well, you were tracking Tarrant
not only on the Internet but in the real world
too in those years leading up to twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
And we know that he did quite a lot of travel.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I mean we knew that beforehand anyway, because he was
asking for reviews on things and posting his itineraries. But
through twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, he was traveling to
sort of a certain area of Europe frequently. Do we know, like,
do we know for sure what he was doing during
those trips.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
I think that we have elements where I feel like
I have a clearer picture of what was going on
at that point, at these points in times, so Tarrant
had become by the day of the attack, obsessed with
an area of Europe known as the Balkans. The Balkans
is a place where people have in very recent history
killed for race and religion. People might be familiar with
(29:28):
the or remember the Balkan Wars of the nineties after
the fall of Yugoslavia the Bosnian which primarily took place
in Bosnia, where Serbian Christian Serbian forces and Croatian Catholic
forces targeted in many ways Bosniak Muslims and eventually committed
the only genocide in Europe since the Second World War
(29:50):
at Sebranitza. And it's very much an area of Europe
where things are still completely kind of divided along racial lines,
and in Serbia in particular, a lot of the people
that carried out those attacks were celebrated. When christ Church happened,
Tarrant had played a song venerating the perpetrator of the
man who would sort of go, who was now in
prison for carrying out that jedocide, had been responsible for
(30:12):
that jedocide at Cebriantis so radvan Krajitch. He also painted
the names of Serb war leaders on his guns in Cyrillic,
the traditional alphabet of Serbia and Eastern Europe. So the
fact that he had been there well on those two
separate troops here, but the fact that he'd been in
Serbia and Bosnia in twenty sixteen became of a focus
(30:35):
point for this investigation. And interestingly enough, while it was
very difficult to retrace exactly what he was doing at
that point in time, Serbian authorities were not particularly forthcoming.
This is where he'd actually emailed the Rifle Club, So
this is about two years before the attack. This is
where he emailed the Rifle Club in New Zealand asking
if they were taking members, which was his first step
(30:57):
in his mobilization towards violence. It was unclear how closely
that was linked to the setting in which it took
place until last year researchers at Auckland University unearthed a
whole bunch of new four Cham posts. They were made anonymously,
but they are with a high degree of certainty were
made by the terrorists. Where he is actually sort of
(31:19):
talking about being in the Balkans, that he claiming that
he was committing acts of violence while he was there
against Muslims, you know, for example, at a bar in Croatia.
And then he talks about wanting the reignition of the
Balkan Wars and that the reignition of another genocide, and
(31:39):
that he would be willing to fund four Chan users
if they sort of post a picture of him, of
themselves being able to fire a weapon to come to
the Balkans to help carry out that genocide. And people
are kind of largely very receptive to the receptive to it.
He's very specific in his claims as well. He says,
you know, he has a investment property which he would
(32:03):
sell to be able to carry it out. That's true.
He did have an investment property that he had with
his sister. So the level of specicificy is kind of
like deeply concerning and very confronting, and those are some
of the most confronting posts from the whole investigation. There
is a second Balkan trip then again, which happens just
months before the attack, and this time he goes to Bulgaria.
(32:24):
He does this sort of like nationalist ultra nationalist pilgrimage.
So Bulgaria is a country right in the southeast corner
of Europe, shares a border with Turkey, and for a
great deal of its history it had been occupied by
the Ottoman Empire, which was a Muslim empire, and the
Bulgarian Christian Bulgaria's kind of wars of resistance against the
(32:46):
Ottomans are a huge part of nationalist mythology, and scattered
throughout the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria are all these locations
celebrating those wars and tarent had left behind an ARCHI
facebook photos that sort of show that he had visited
a whole bunch of these places, and I followed in
his footsteps in Bulgaria. You know, while I don't want
to sort of be that journalist goes to another country
(33:07):
and starts, you know, judging it's it's it's politics anyway,
but you know, in terms of having explanatory power for
this story's I've never seen so many kind of swastikas
in my life. It's a country where a lot of
extremist groups in Western Europe do activities there because they
feel like they can get a more get away with
more there. The institutions are weaker compared to the rest
(33:28):
of Europe, but all of their propaganda, interestingly, was in English,
and I found out that they were regularly being visited
by far right extremists from Western Europe, for example. And yeah,
there's certainly a theory that this would have been the
reason of why Tarrant had become so obsessed with this
part of the world, and maybe that he'd even been
in contact with these groups and years leading up to
the attack. It certainly shows kind of just how much
(33:51):
more that was going on and things like Bulgaria, which
it first seems so random and obscure, started to make
a lot more sense.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
There is records of Tarrent donating to various far right figures.
One of those is Austrian muttin Zelna who he and
his girlfriend together do a lot of work in this
far right space. They have podcasts, they do a lot
of discussions with people around their belief systems, and we couldn't, well,
(34:19):
you couldn't prove that they actually met in person whilst
he was in Europe. But he would then become I believe,
the only person to be investigated in relation to the
shooting in christ Church outside of the New Zealand investigation
because of his potential links to Tarrant and potentially to
(34:40):
be motivating him to do what he did. How much
do we know about the relationship between those two and
just how close were they and could he have influenced
Tarran to do what he did?
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Yeah? So. Martin Selmer is the leader of probably the
most prominent member of an organization called the Identitarian Movement,
which began in France around twenty ten and twenty eleven,
but slowly spread to Europe. In twenty seventeen and twenty
eighteen and then became the title of Tarence Manifesto. Right, so,
(35:13):
because of the the and Tarrent was certainly throughout the
manifesto obsessed with this theory, and that he propagated it
in himself. This meant that immediately after there was heaps
of commentary in the media about these crazy similarities between
the ideology of Martin Zelner and the ideology of the
christ Church terrorist and people wondered whether there were any links.
Very soon after that it became apparent that Tarrant had
(35:35):
donated a fairly large donation of about fifteen hundred dollars
to Martin Zelner. He then came under investigation. In the
course of that investigation, it was revealed he originally sort
of said that that was the extent of it, and
maybe that they'd exchanged an email, but in the course
of that investigation it came out that they'd actually she
had quite a comprehensive email exchange, that Tarrent had been
(35:59):
invited by Zelna to come and meet him for a
coffee or a beer if he was ever in Vienna,
and after the day after the last email had been
exchange between the two Tarrant had actually booked a higher
car for a trip to Vienna that he would take
after Bulgaria. So we're really talking, you know, just months,
really really, you know, weeks even before the attack, right
at the end of twenty eighteen. I think it's sort
of November twenty eighteen. Zelna obviously, like emphatically denies ever
(36:25):
having met with Tarran. I don't know whether during that
trip Zelna and Tarrant actually met. The record of Tarent's
time in Austria is extremely limited. I noticed the way
New Zealand investigated investigators talk about it in their report.
They they're kind of inconclusive. They say it's unlikely that
he would have met with Zelda because he wouldn't have quote,
(36:47):
wanted to withdraw at security attention to himself so close
to the attack. That may as well, that may well
be true.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Well, let's talk.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
About the month or two he spends in New Zealand
before the day he decides to live stream the attack
on those mosques.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
What was he doing in that time? You know, we
know that he has reached out to the rifle club.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
We know that he has learnt to shoot through a
game a friend of his who's gone shooting together. Like,
so we know that he's kind of prepping himself at
this stage, but what do we know about what he's
doing and saying online? Is he making it very clear
that he is about.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
To do what he's going to do.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I think that unquestionably he's forecasting the violence that he's
about to plan. I mean, we had this period leading
up to the attack where his real life world is
unquestionably extremely alone, but his online world seems to be
quite engaged and grown.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Because his apartment is like bear right, he's barely got
any furniture in his apartment.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
He's living a very like scant.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, it's extremely scant, and I mean he so the
move to New Zealand, you know, originally was one of
those things that seemed kind of like just random, especially
because it was to Duneed And I mean maybe if
he'd gone to Auckland it would have made more sense,
but he had no family connections in Duneed, you know.
But now that we know that his radicalization trajectory and
(38:09):
that he had already been resolving towards violence for years
before that, it starts to look more like a strategic decision. Right,
this was something that he would do because he knew
that he would have more lenient gun laws there. He
had a friend that he'd met gaming in Waikato at
the other end of the country that assisted him in
getting his gun license. He became his referee, and the
(38:31):
father of this gaming friend became Tarent's second referee, and
this was within weeks of him arriving in New Zealand.
He'd already applied for his gun license. He then regularly trained,
he went to the gym. He didn't have much of
an online social he didn't have much of a real
social life whatsoever. You know, as you said, there was
not much even furniture in his apartment, but there was
(38:52):
a computer and so much of the social engagement that
we see in that period leading out to the attack,
that's where that happened, including that forecasting of violence. So
the main events that we have in Tarren's life, things
like at one stage he at the end of twenty seventeen,
he injures himself when he's cleaning his rifle and he
has to present to hospital to get his eye fixed
(39:14):
because of injuries that he'd sustained in that moment in time,
he also has to go to hospital another period for
steroid use. He'd been abusing steroids, it seemed, and that
was his second presentation. These are the nature of his
social interaction. They all seem to revolve around something to
do with the attack in January. On I think the
twelfth of January, he'd taken a trip to christ Church
(39:36):
where he conducted surveillance of the mosque. He'd phone a
drone over the mosque to sort of work out how
he was going to carry out the attack, and otherwise
he was just sort of meticulously training. I mean, he
was in many ways the realization, the ultimate realization of
what James Mason had predicted and asked for and what
(39:58):
these groups were calling for as of a one man army.
This was coordinated lone actor terrorism.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Then he makes a fine call the night before the attack,
calls his mum and she even she says that phone
call wasn't quite right.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, that's right. His mum told Australian investigators that he'd
said that he loved her, which is not something he
said very often. And you know, I try, I try
in this sort of investigation to focus on the worlds
around Tarent and not him so much specifically but you know,
certainly there is a kind of element of like deep
dark tragedy in that moment in time, because Yeah, then
(40:38):
the next day he goes and sort of carries out
the unimaginable, unimaginable that had been a consequence of worlds
that his mom certainly wouldn't have known about her understood,
worlds that most Australians certainly wouldn't have known about or understood.
And I think that's why we kind of came to
see him as being completely alone, because they were so
(40:59):
invisible to everyone else around him.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Next, I asked Joy about the manifesto that Arrant published
online on the day of the attack and the dangerous
repercussions of it being made available to the internet. As
you mentioned, he published his manifesto online on the day
of the attack. He also emailed it to then Prime
Minister Jacinda Arderne's office. We kind of understand what the
(41:27):
manifesto included, but where does that exist now?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Once you put something on.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The Internet, it's generally there forever, and as you mentioned,
it was translated into a bunch of different languages, It
was shared far and wide across the world. Can you
ever remove something like that? From the Internet.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Yeah, I think it's important to say as well that
he had been not only strategic in the way that
he committed the violence, but I'd argue even more strategic
in the way that he created his propaganda in order
for this to become an inspirational act of terrorism. Right,
he'd live stream the attack, He'd created a manifesto that
(42:04):
was deliberately targeted to the multiple communities that he was
operating in, things that made him look kind of insane
to people that were outside those communities, that made kind
of complete sense to people that were on eight chan.
It was full of in jokes and then of course
references to some of the darkest stuff like the James
Mason stuff that we had spoken about. But you know,
through the live stream, which he knew would be proliferated
(42:27):
through the Internet by by eight chan, as by and
people in the other extremist forums around eight chan. He
knew that it would be share thousands and thousands of times.
He'd done that thing of you know, that that thing
that inspirational terrorists tried to do, which is to create
terrorism that looks like theater, that something that can be
consumed not so different to the spectacle of having planes
fly into the World Trade Center. You know, it's not
(42:50):
just about the damage that's inflicted on the people that
are in the towers, and it's not just about you know,
the fifty one dead and all of the injured, including
you know, children as young as three and four that
are shot on that day in the mosques. It's also
you know, about creating the spectacle, the inspirational spectacle for
people to consume it and to you know, hopefully or
(43:11):
his hope is that they would then kind of carry
it on. And that is certainly absolutely what we've seen.
It's interesting that Australia as Australia sort of had this
collective amnesia around the event, as we sort of forget,
for tried to forget that it had ever happened. People
in this community became obsessed with it. Very soon after,
there was a shift away from some of these forums
(43:34):
onto a new space called Telegram. I think christ Church
was really important in that because you know, it was
clear that that they weren't going to be tenable for
much longer, and they were right. For example, eight Chan,
the company cloud Fare that provided the web infrastructure for it,
stopped doing that by August that year, and so a
lot of these people moved to a different messaging platform
called Telegram, which is owned by this Russian tech billionaire
(43:58):
Pavel du supposedly has fathered two hundred kids around the world.
He is like a pro natalist guy, and he he'd
set up Telegram deliberately to be unsubpoenable, like it's the
Shell companies. Within Shell companies, it's registered in the British
Virgin Islands and Dubai, and within those websites, you know,
a new network kind of formed called Terragram that was
(44:21):
very much relied on what happened in christ Church as
a core part of its propaganda. So they created a,
for example, a pantheon of saints. This is something that
Islamic extremists had had the wide extremists had not yet had,
which was a culture of martyrdom. Tarrant was seen very much,
along with Anders Bravict for the Oslo terrorist as the
(44:42):
original state in the pantheon, and it encouraged other users
to carry out similar acts in order to be added
to this pantheon, you know, to be venerated and respected
by this community. And that absolutely happened. So it's It's
wild how Tarrent was both a kind of a product
of the propaganda in these communities, but then he also
became propaganda in him in himself.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
The whole purpose of your podcast is to show that
whilst we see Tarrent as a lone terrorist, as someone
who did this purely off their own back, that in reality,
he had hundreds, if not thousands of people with him
that day. There were those who had that link and
watch that live stream. There were those who had helped
(45:26):
radicalize him, who had even down to showing him how
to modify the weapons that he used on that day.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Do we then presume that when we see any.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
Other reports of loan terror attacks or loan gunmen, or
someone who acts seemingly off their own back, that potentially
there's always a community of thousands involved in that person planning, creating, training,
and then taking actual action in the real world.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
I don't think so. I think there definitely are actors
of that. There definitely are instances where violence is truly
sort of committed on a loan actor level. Right For example,
I would say it would be difficult to pin the
bond a junction stabbing to any sort of larger ideology
in the same way. I think the Port Arthur massacre, right,
this was a guy that was had a long history
(46:19):
of being psychologically disturbed. He wasn't connected to any broader ecosystem.
But I think what we're talking about is is a
specific subsection of mash shooters, which is you know, far
right terrorism. And I think in those cases it's becoming
increasingly clear that they are borrowing from a deeper ideology.
(46:40):
And it's always an extremely difficult thing to know, you know,
in the black box of the human mind, where the
ideology begins and where the proclivity to violence or the well,
you know what researchers would call the pool factors, the
push factors towards extremism begin. But I think in this
case specifically, and indeed I think in definitely in other cases,
(47:03):
the explanatory value of those communities, like they it's pretty
much undeniable. But yeah, it's really difficult, and it's becoming
more and I think it's becoming more and more difficult.
Like going back to that terogram designation last week, right,
Like we used to have a clear kind of sense
of what a terrorist organization looked like and in the
(47:23):
period leading up to christ Church it kind of starts
to break down. I mean, we mentioned how one of
the former members of Adam Woffin told me how the
group was centralized but also decentralized. So they did have
something that looked like that, Like they did train together,
they did create propaganda strategically, they did kind of organize
a little bit across state lines in the US and
a little bit in Australia. But also the purpose of
the group was to go beyond the group. It was
(47:44):
it was really to inspire people to go, you know,
to use their language. Guns are blazing, even if that
meant on the other side of the world. And then
now it's become sort of even more and morphous. We
have a thing like like terogram. All it really is
is like a bunch of chats like it's it really
is like a bunch of chats that you can kind
(48:05):
of access on your smart It has no discernible leadership structure.
I mean, there have been some people that have arrested
for particular incitements to violence, but it doesn't have any
discernible leadership structure. It's not even clear you know, what
is a specific terogram chat and what isn't. And now
we're saying, you know that in Australia people could be
charged for up to twenty five years in jail for
(48:25):
being a member of Terogram. But you know, I wonder
and it really is interesting that happened last week because
it speaks to the kind of complexity of this loan
actor thing. It's like, well, you know, what does it
mean to be a member of Tereogram. I mean, there
are a bunch of chats you know, on your on
your smartphone, so.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
And there's a bunch of researchers and journalists and all
kinds of people.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Sure, sure, yeah, we hope. I mean that's why. Yeah,
And I guess that goes back to your question before.
It's like, you know, as a researcher, I do infiltrate
this base, So I do have you know, pseudonyms that
I use on these sites. And it is alarming how
kind of easy it is still now to be able
to access so terror related material, you know, just like
(49:04):
you know, right now, I could do it right now,
sittings sitting across from you. So yeah, it's a really
it's a really difficult environment. And I don't envy the
role that intelligence agencies need to play in trying to
monitor this space. It certainly is not nothing like what
it used to be.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
I think many of us are familiar with what happened
on that day in twenty nineteen. I mean some people
have even seen it, having seen the live stream. I've
never actually looked at it. We know that more than
fifty people died that day, and potentially could have been more.
As you mentioned, he was intercepted potentially on his way
to a third mosque when he was run off the
(49:41):
road by police. But do you think a lot of
lessons were learned after that day? I mean it definitely
rocked New Zealand to its core because it was so
unexpected and they weren't aware at you know, Tarrent having
potentially taken advantage of their lax gun laws compared to Australia,
for example, So there was a Royal commission, there were
(50:02):
changes to gun laws. Do you think the things that
happened in the wake of that christ Church attack have
gone any ways to potentially stopping it from happening again?
Speaker 3 (50:12):
I really hope. So. I worry about the fact that
Australia had distanced itself so much from the attack, and
the fact that it happened in New Zealand meant that
New Zealand agencies really had to bear the brunt of
responsibility for the attack, and so much of the analysis
that's publicly available is about their role, you know, what
they had missed. But really, you know, New Zealand was
(50:33):
the setting, but actually had very very little to do
with what happened in christ Church.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
They were just the last destination.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
There were the last destination and gun laws and an
exception to that, and just sinda Idern sort of like Howard.
John Howard had after Poort Arthur passed gun law reform
to make it more difficult to access things like semi
automatic weapons in New Zealand, and those I mean apparently
are being contested in New Zealand Parliament now and there
are people who who you know, as they often are
with gun legislation, it has become you know, within the
(51:04):
realm of controversial unfortunate. But in Australia, like I don't know,
there wasn't much of a response, both socially and culturally
as we said, but also in institutionally. I mean, we
never had an inquiry here as to what had led
him to violence. I mean, it's a societal wide problem
and something that I think will need to be addressed.
(51:26):
And while I sincerely hope that something like christ Church
would never happen again, I think there's a lot of
feeling within the community that within the research community specifically
that christ Church wouldn't might not necessarily be the last
time something like this happens, and I just hope that
we're in a position to be able to stop it
(51:47):
before it does.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
Thank you to Joey for helping us tell this story today.
There's a link to his podcast, Loan Actor in the
show notes. True Crime Conversations is a podcast hosted by
me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman, with audio
designed by Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.
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