The self-declared “soldier of Christ” was also planning to attack either a mall or a mosque and kill men by stabbing them.
Police have told the courts he intended this to be a suicide mission.
Police searched Keefe’s house in September 2024 and found two bladed weapons – a machete and a bayonet.
Crown lawyer Megan Mitchell, who prosecuted Keefe’s case in the Napier District Court, said Keefe intended to target Muslim men particularly.
Keefe pleaded guilty last year to 13 charges, including knowingly distributing child exploitation material, possessing objectionable publications, exposing a young person to indecent material, threatening to kill and failing to comply with a computer search.
In December, Judge Richard Earwaker jailed him for five years and four months, and placed him on the child sex offender register for eight years.
Keefe’s lawyer Matt Dixon asked for name suppression to continue even after Keefe had been sentenced.
In part, he argued that naming him in public might impair his prospects for rehabilitation.
Permanent name suppression was opposed by NZME.
Permanent name suppression declined
Judge Earwaker declined to order permanent suppression, saying Keefe’s case did not meet the threshold of being likely to cause him extreme hardship.
Keefe, of Flaxmere in Hastings, distributed extreme child sexual exploitation material while communicating with members of an international online extremist group known as 764.
Keefe had multiple online profiles and has said he wanted to be seen by the group as an “edge lord” – someone who posts shocking or extreme material on the internet.
Judge Earwaker has described the images and videos as “horrific” and “repugnant”, causing physical and emotional harm to the children involved and helping create more demand for such material.
Keefe had a total of 93 hours of video in his collection. One of his devices contained more than 54,000 media files.
Keefe also contacted a 13-year-old girl online and got her to send him sexually explicit images of herself by pretending to be a boy close to her age and offering to give her gaming tokens.
Keefe’s threat to kill people came to police attention after a tip-off to New Zealand authorities from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been alerted by a young American woman with whom Keefe had been communicating for about two years.
The American woman was not the girl he coerced into sending him images.
Court documents say he told the young woman in America “repeatedly and in detail” about his desire to commit a mass killing, wanting to copy high-profile terrorist and extremist attacks to gain public notoriety.
A police summary of facts said Keefe’s “extremist ideologies” and his wish to conduct a mass stabbing event were considered a “national security threat”.
Keefe had written in a diary that he was radicalised at the age of 19 and was “a soldier of Christ, his country, people and religion”.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.
