A new investigation into the Christchurch mosque shooting delves into the terrorist’s radicalisation, exposing the violent ideology he harboured for years before the 2019 massacre.
Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 worshippers and injured dozens more after opening fire on Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre on March 15, 2019.
In the six-part podcast, Secrets We Keep: Lone Actor, investigative journalist Joey Watson traces Tarrant’s descent into extremism and questions if he truly acted alone.
Watson said his reporting had shone a light on Tarrant’s proclivity for violence as early as 2015.
Watson utilised a trove of posts made by the terrorist across several websites, which identified a clear shift in his thinking between the middle of 2014 and 2015.
Tarrant’s messages shifted from detailing his extensive travel plans to celebrations of and calls for violence.
In June 2015, a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed nine people during a bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
It was the oldest black church in the southern United States.
Days after the massacre, Tarrant – while travelling overseas – posted online in support of the terrorist’s attack and his white supremacist worldview.
“Violence is the last resort of a cornered animal. It was always going to come to this,” Tarrant wrote.
The post to the 4chan message board was among those unearthed by University of Auckland researchers last year.
This period also marked his online use of usernames referencing extremist ideology, Watson said.
Even then, almost four years before the attack on Christchurch, Tarrant was demonstrating his extreme nativist worldview and support for violent ends, Watson said.
“The more I read, the more elaborate his ideology starts to look,” the journalist said in the podcast.
“Tarrant is hoping the attack on a church will trigger a chain of reactions that will descend into outright war.”
Tarrant had called for further attacks at that time.
Watson also spoke to sources around the world, who suggested Tarrant might have had connections to an international neo-Nazi network.
Tarrant was asked to join the Lads Society, an Australian white nationalist and Islamophobic extremist group, in 2017.
Following Tarrant’s attack in Christchurch, the group’s members posted to a closed social media channel.
Some celebrated the attack, others questioned if it was a false flag, possibly to restrict firearms access in New Zealand.
“This one’s not a false flag. Take my word for it,” the group’s founder Thomas Sewell said.
“He seems to know more than the others,” another member replied.
“What do you mean, take my word for it. That almost sounds like you know the cobber.”
Sewell then responded – Tarrant had “been in the scene for a while”.
Sewell later compared Tarrant to Nelson Mandela, saying he would be imprisoned until “we win the revolution”.
Tarrant had also posted menacing messages on the social media page of a precursor group of the Lads Society.
Watson also travelled to Austria, Bulgaria and Serbia to examine Tarrant’s possible links to extremists in those countries.
Watson spoke to a source with intelligence connections in Bulgaria who said Tarrant had spent time with “migrant hunter” groups on the border with Turkey.
“The theory that Tarrant might have been in contact and possibly trained with these migrant hunter groups painted a whole different picture of what he was doing in this part of the world,” Watson said in episode four.
“This was a direct contradiction of the long-held narrative about Tarrant – that he was alone.”
Whether Tarrant was physically part of such groups or not, he was clearly part of an online white nationalist ecosystem.
It demonstrated “how interconnected the world of the far right had become, how groups were organising across borders, mobilising around shared goals”, Watson said.
“People who carried out attacks alone were often tapping into a global network.”
In that sense, Tarrant was far from a lone actor, Watson concluded.
“After spending the last two years retracing the steps of the terrorist, it’s clear he had deep-rooted ties to far-right extremism. This was arguably the biggest news story in Australia in the last 10 years, and there was so much we missed.”
The podcast is exclusively found on LiSTNR.
– RNZ