Co-ordinated review of events leading to attack at New Lynn Countdown launched

A victim of the LynnMall terrorist knife attack being rushed to hospital. Photo / Alex Burton

A co-ordinated review will look into the actions of New Zealand Police, the Department of Corrections and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service leading up to the terror attack in New Lynn on September 3, 2021.

The review will be conducted by the Independent Police Conduct Authority, the Office of the Inspectorate at the Department of Corrections, and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

The review is intended to be completed and reported on by mid-March next year.

Terrorist Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen attacked and injured seven people with a knife at New Lynn Countdown that Friday. Police from the Special Tactics Group shot and killed him shortly after the attack began.

Samsudeen had been under surveillance since his release from prison seven weeks earlier, because he was deemed a terrorist threat.

In a statement, the IPCA said there was a need to review the events leading up to the attack and Samsudeen's death and the extent to which the risk assessment and mitigation strategies in place to respond to the perceived threat he posed were appropriate and adequate.

It said there should be a co-ordinated review because each agency involved in the matter "has its own oversight mechanism empowered to review its decisions and actions".

"It is highly likely that at least some of the decisions and actions taken in this matter involved inter-agency cooperation, with no individual agency being solely responsible for them," it said.

"It is therefore appropriate that the oversight bodies should coordinate their efforts to ensure that the inter-agency or 'collective' decisions and actions are properly examined as a whole, rather than being considered in a fragmented way because the individual agency was only a part of the whole picture."

The review will examine whether the decisions and actions taken by police, Corrections and the NZSIS to assess and mitigate the threat posed by Samsudeen were appropriate and adequate.

It will also examine the collective decisions and actions of the relevant agencies.