Husna Ahmed

If anyone has a right to be hailed a hero – and she would have gently shooed it away like a pesky blowfly – it’s Husna Ahmed (1974 – 2019).

And not just for her incredible actions amidst the hail of bullets on March 15. For Husna had always been a fighter, natural-born. Her mother died before she could walk or talk. This was back in Bangladesh, raised by her father until he too transferred to the afterlife. Yet to reach her teens, she was fiercely independent, tough, and pious. A gifted schoolgirl runner, charging in front.

The day she landed in New Zealand, wide-eyed and nineteen, she married Farid Ahmed. Together they were the A-team. Six years later, a drunk driver smashed Farid into a paraplegic and they made a choice right there: They were going to live their lives doing whatever pleased them.

For the next two decades, Husna was a full-time volunteer. Helping women, kids, neighbours, at different faith centres. They took classes every weekend under the golden-domed mosque, shunning holidays. Compassionate, confident, charming. Her smile radiated from her hijab-wrapped face, valiant, kind eyes glittering. She’d visit someone in hospital and return home with six new friends for tea. That was typical, Farid smiles.  

And so come 1.40pm on Friday, March 15, 2019 at her beloved Al Noor Masjid on Deans Ave, Christchurch. A heavily-armed gunman, with GoPro camera blinking, parks across from Hagley Park, 165 hectares donated by early settlers and "reserved forever as a public park, and open for the recreation and enjoyment of the public".

He walks inside and starts shooting his automatic weapon at every living soul. Returning several times, reloaded, searching. The killer can’t find the women and children, who as per Islamic tradition are separated from the main hall during the Jumu'ah or Friday prayer. That’s where Husna is. When she hears the shooting, she knows she has to move. Any posthumous medal citation would surely read… “at great personal risk to herself”… as Husna shepherded the women and children out of harm’s way, sending them running, sprinting for their lives down Deans Ave and away, around the corner, on and on don’t stop. But she returned. Three times, according to one witness, searching for her wheelchair user husband Farid.

He usually prayed in the front-right section of the main hall. But that day, he’d been distracted entering the masjid. He’d seen a brother in a side room who’d been ill of late, and he wanted to check on him. Once the shooting started, the dead bodies blocked his wheels. Thinking this was it, he sat and made his final prayers. When he looked up again, he saw the exit clear and took the chance to flee.

Meanwhile, Husna had hustled into the main hall. Wailing, groaning wounded called. Others played dead. One young worshipper later told Farid that he’d been knocked unconscious in the bloody mayhem and when he came to, Husna was yelling at him: “Run! Run! Get out!” So he ran. Later, he wondered why Husna was there, in such grave peril, and just why he didn’t he pull her hand along with him.

High and low she searched for her man. One shot man lying bleeding on the floor would later recall her shouting for Farid and being shot from behind as she rushed out the door. She fell on the footpath and was shot twice again.

Today, Farid is far from surprised by his wife’s actions.

“She has always been there for me,” he says.

While Farid famously forgives his wife’s killer - and he has taken extraordinary strength from his unblinded faith - nothing can remove the well of pain deep in his heart. He tries to use her memory as a power source for good. He wants to keep on giving, just as she would want him to. But he knows that he has lost. A losing battle without no end.

“I can’t win because she has given her life. I cannot compete with her. Happily, I take that defeat,” he sobs. “But I don’t want to sit and moan about it, I want to carry on doing good, so that her memory is like a positive power for me. We don’t know how many seconds we have, so I need to make sure I use my time to spread the message of love and peace wherever I go.”

Len Peneha

Len Peneha, with his salt ‘n’ pepper beard and spongy hair that his daughter reckons needs a trim, is a man who laughs easily. Down the local pub quiz or social indoor netball, he loves a chuckle, I mean who doesn’t, right? It’s treated him well throughout his 53 years and helped make him a likeable fella, like that frowning uncle who’s really your favourite and slips you cash when your parents are gasbagging.

But lately, his infectious, hearty laugh - often a defence mechanism - has been trailing off, a highly-tuned engine with a misfiring cylinder. Fading into a sadness that films deep, brown eyes.

He acted without thinking on March 15. At first, he thought the strange popping sounds from next door was falling scaffolding pipes. But when he saw a petrified woman streaking past his driveway, sprinting, “running as fast as she could to get away”, he realised it was gunshots. Lots of them.

The IT consultant had popped home at lunchtime, unusual for him, to loan his 19-year-old daughter Jasmine his car. A strange vehicle had blocked the driveway to his Deans Ave townhouse and he was waiting for it to move. It belonged to the shooter.

When he realised a tragedy was unfolding next door at Al Noor, Peneha and Jasmine fled back inside their two-storey property. Phoning 111, they ran upstairs to her bedroom. From there, they looked down into the mosque car-park. Terrified Muslims were scattering in all directions. Continuous gunshots.

A stream of people started clambering over the 2m-high white concrete breezeblock wall that separates the shared driveway of Peneha’s place and the mosque property. Jasmine yelled out, “Save them, save them!”

Peneha bolted outside. About ten people had already made it over. He started dragging, hauling, pulling frightened people over the wall; he reckons about ten more. Ducking, sheltering, he shouted for them to take refuge in his apartment – they would be safe there.

But one guy, he couldn’t help. All Peneha could see was a hand clutching the top of the wall. He must’ve been shot, Peneha thinks, too weak to haul himself over. He couldn’t get the leverage needed to rescue him. He still doesn’t know what happened to him.

“It still bothers me actually.”

Throughout, Peneha felt nothing but a numb calmness. Surreal. No panic, just doing what had to be done. Adrenalin. Two guys hiding in his house ventured out. They thought an Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) officer was down the bottom of the driveway and started going towards him, to what they thought was safety. But Peneha grabbed them and threw them back inside – it was the gunman still on the loose.

Then he watched in horror as a fleeing woman fell across his driveway, with the shooter following behind her, gun raised.

“He shot the young lady at the end of my driveway and I saw him do it.”

When he was sure it was over, he went to the mosque, to see if he could help. Bodies were lying in the entranceway, sparking an immediate panic attack.

“I couldn’t do any more after that,” Peneha says. “The shock of seeing them there was just too much.”

He was overcome by a great noise: sirens, screaming, sharp into focus the magnitude of the slaughter. A man walked past with what looked like fluff on the back of his jersey. It was brain matter.

Peneha got drunk that night. Later in KFC, his shaking hands couldn’t direct the burger into his mouth. For weeks there were flashbacks, sleepless nights. Nightmares. More panic attacks.

One night, weeks later, he was walking home along Deans Ave, when another panic attack struck. He saw potential gunmen everywhere and ducked into driveways to hide.

Every day he drove down his driveway, he saw the woman gunned down there and apologised. Counselling helped but he had to move. And on his last day, he didn’t apologise, but said goodbye.

Nine months on, he’s doing better. He’s reunited with three of the five who hid in his house that day. One guy, who Peneha stopped from walking down the driveway to the gunman, brought his family around with gifts. He believes Peneha saved his life.

“On the day I helped people… and I’m glad I did. And yeah some people may have run away from it, but that’s a normal reaction too. At the time I didn’t really know what I was doing. I don’t think bravery came into it. That’s just six minutes out of a whole lifetime and that one moment shouldn’t define me as a person. You could say that I’ve been brave all my life by still being here…”

He laughs at that. And it makes Jasmine laugh too. But the smiles soon fade and all that’s left is a nodding silence.

Abdul Aziz

The man who chased the gunman, armed only with an Eftpos-card reader.

The man who picked up a discarded semi-automatic weapon and tried to fire back, foiled only by spent ammunition.

The Afghanistan-born antiques trader, with something about him of the Peruvian cowboy, or even the heroin-chasing hitman Vincent Vega in Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, with his dark, broody looks and tight ponytail, who furiously speared a gun through the fleeing shooter’s car window.

The 48-year-old father of four sons who saved many lives.

“The Linwood Mosque hero”.

The first time I encountered Aziz was also on March 15. After a news editor phoned for me to check out “possible gunshots” at a Christchurch mosque, I headed for the city. Within minutes it was clearly worse than that. As I drove at, um, slightly above the speed limit, ahem, people started sending me the livestream video. And the rambling hate-filled manifesto. Around 2.30pm, a video came in of two police officers wrestling with a heavily-clad man on Brougham St.

The city was snarled around Hagley Park, and with news there had been a second shooting at Linwood Mosque, I headed there. Chaotic scenes, armed police with guns raised running everywhere, sirens wailing, people crying. A worker at the block of shops beside the wooden back-section masjid, on the stony grounds of the old Christchurch Bahai Centre, had footage of a man being interrogated by police. He soon sent it to me on WhatsApp, at 3.08pm. A strapping, tall police constable holds the man, who turns out to be Aziz, firmly by the shoulder against the wall of a nail salon. It looks like Aziz may be handcuffed? Thinking he might’ve been involved? Confusion everywhere. Aziz is explaining how he confronted a gun-wielding murderer who slayed members of his congregation. “He’s tried to chase me,” the agitated innocent can be heard saying above the police sirens and barking Alsatians. “He f****** ran away... no, no, no…”

He was lucky to be alive. The second attack, just moments after the first some 6kms across town at Al Noor, started at about 1.55pm. Nine worshippers gunned dead. Aziz was there, praying with his sons.

Imam Alabi Lateef Zirullah says his brother Aziz saved many more lives that day. By grabbing the Eftpos card reader – the only likely weapon immediately to hand – and chasing after the rampager, passing dead bodies. As the attacker went to get a fresh gun from his car, Aziz hurled the card reader at him. Getting within metres, the shooter aimed at Aziz and fired, narrowly missing. He’d report hearing the whoosh of bullets pass his head. He ducked and dodged between parked cars, picking up a discarded gun and trying to fire it. Click. He shouted, “Come! I’m here!” trying to get his attention as the gunman went back to the mosque and started shooting again.

As the gunman took off down the long shingle drive, Aziz chased him, hurling insults, throwing an abandoned gun, like a spear, through the front windshield, shattering it, as he sped off, scared. Aziz pursued holding one of his guns.

I’ve met Aziz several times since that day. He’s quiet, calm, peaceful within himself. He volunteers to vacuum the spongy new mosque carpet before Friday prayers. When considering a question, he inhales wearily before his raspy voice replies.

Although Afghanistan has suffered many wars over its tumultuous history, Aziz enjoying growing up in a calm Kabul, leaving when he was 12 years old. After 27 years in Sydney, he moved to post-quake Christchurch nearly three years ago and started an antiques and furniture shop in the rocky coastal suburb of Redcliffs. 

He enjoys the quiet life. Spending time with his family and brothers at Linwood Islamic Centre. But boy does he fancy just 15 minutes alone in a room with the killer… a man he refers to only as “that coward”.

When a certain Rodrick Woods gatecrashed an emotional group of mosque shooting survivors outside court after one of the alleged gunman’s appearances, and spouted that they need to "get over it" and that "white supremacists own the land", who was it that confronted him? Aziz. He told Woods that he’d better move on, swiftly. Being the tough guy, that’s not Aziz. But when someone needs to step up and do the right thing, he’s the man.

Like Len Peneha, and many others that day, Aziz doesn’t believe he acted heroically.

But amongst the Edwardian furniture, ceramic trinkets, candelabras, and curiosities, he keeps a colourful, cardboard sign drawn by a thankful local: “You are our hero Abdul”.

Cass

In those first few dark weeks, when it all got too much, I sometimes had to get away. Specifically, I sought refuge in the Sir Robertson and Dame Adrienne Stewart Gallery of the Christchurch Art Gallery. Up the stairs, beneath Bill Culbert’s playful hanging chairs and fluorescent tubes installation, past Frederick Muir’s 1886 photo of a Maori tomb at Maketu Pa, glancing by the noble elder portraits of C.F. Goldie (1870 – 1947) and Gottfried Lindauer (1839 - 1926) and into the Waiting for a Train exhibition. Slumping in front of Cass, the New Zealand masterpiece by Rita Angus (1908 – 1970) in the groundbreaking Canterbury School of Fine Arts style. A man waiting at the railway station puffs on a pipe.

Parched yellow hills and a triangular composition drawing me in. Contemplating like the waiting man. A sense of calm enveloping me, lifting my shoulders and filling my lungs. A sense of comfort in the pictures, quiet reflective solitude. I wonder, as an atheist, whether this is what my Muslim brothers are doing by turning to Allah in prayer, finding the strength to go on.

Just 10-15 minutes, max, and I’m ready to forge back into things. Out past Olivia Spencer-Bower (1905 – 1982), Bill Sutton (1917-2000) and Colin McCahon (1919 – 1987), and back into the uneven, cracked city streets, meandering river, and jangling trams.

‘Country Cops’

For nearly nine months we couldn’t name the two police officers who caught the alleged gunman. They knew who they were. And so did their comrades, mates, and loved ones.

“We know our families are truly proud of what we were able to do, and that has helped tremendously in the past months. For us, knowing we played our part in possibly preventing further casualties is really important,” they said in a statement after being recognised for their bravery at the annual Police Association Conference in October.

So what could we say? Both were based in small Canterbury towns. Good mates. Played years of club rugby together out in the country. Nearly six decades on the job between them. And how earlier that day they’d come to Christchurch for an armed room-clearing training session at Cashmere’s Princess Margaret Hospital.

That’s what they were doing when the call came through: an active armed offender in the city.

This week, a court-imposed interim name suppression order lapsed, allowing us to reveal their identities: Senior Constable Jim Manning and Senior Constable Scott Carmody.

They paired up, taking a work patrol car. They got their firearms ready as they chose to skirt the city rather than head to Linwood or battle CBD gridlock, thinking like a fleeing criminal would.

Cruising down Brougham Street they spotted a gold Subaru matching the description they’d been given, weaving through traffic with its hazard lights on. They confirmed the rego, that it was the right car, spun a U-turn.

With 58 years’ experience between them, they knew they had a choice: engage in a pursuit or end it now. Not knowing what weaponry lay waiting ahead of them.

They rammed the driver's side. Dramatic footage from a passerby shows the officers dragging him out of the passenger side and pinning him down. It was over.

One of the officers phoned their boss Senior Sergeant Pete Stills to advise that they’d damaged a patrol car.

Manning and Carmody, Stills said, were not - and did not want to be described as - heroes. “They were just doing their jobs, what they are trained to do. It was a good catch.”

While both “humble guys” say they only did what other officers would've done in the same position, Police Association president Chris Cahill says there is only one way to describe them: heroes.

"They made the call that if they didn't act now, this presented an ongoing danger. They simply acted because they felt they had to, and that epitomises bravery."