Police outside the New Lynn Countdown supermarket following a terrorist atttack in 2021 in which six people were injured. Photo / Alex Burton
Police outside the New Lynn Countdown supermarket following a terrorist atttack in 2021 in which six people were injured. Photo / Alex Burton
A coronial inquest begins next week into the terror attack at a New Lynn supermarket in September 2021.
The first phase aims to answer survivors’ questions about whether the knife attack could have been prevented.
The attacker, Ahamad Samsudeen, was being surveilled by police at the time, who shot him dead minutes into the attack.
Graphic CCTV footage of a terror attack in a New Lynn supermarket will be shown to a closed court when an inquest gets underway next week.
More than three years after six people were stabbed in the knife attack, a coronial inquest will consider whether government agencies could havedone more to prevent it.
The attacker, Ahamad Samsudeen, had been released from prison months earlier and was under surveillance by police at the time.
He was shot dead by police at the New Lynn Countdown supermarket in September 2021, minutes after beginning the frenzied attack.
Coroner Marcus Elliott will hear from survivors, witnesses, police officers, Corrections staff, doctors and others during the 10-day hearing.
The first phase is partly driven by questions from survivors about the attack. In particular, survivors wanted to know why police who were surveilling Samsudeen were not inside the supermarket at the time of the incident and whether this would have prevented the stabbings.
The police have applied to suppress some sensitive evidence, including CCTV footage from inside the supermarket during the violence. Members of the public will be excluded from the hearing when the footage is played.
The police submission said the footage was graphic, could compromise the safety of police officers, and breached the privacy of witnesses in the supermarket during a traumatic event.
The second phase of the inquest will cover the four-month period in which Samsudeen was living in the community before the attack. He was under constant police supervision and living in an Auckland mosque at the time, which media are legally unable to identify.
The third phase will look at the attacker’s time in prison, much of which was spent in segregation and on remand. Samsudeen was in and out of jail over a period of four years on a range of offences related to the possession of objectionable material.
The second and third phases will have a special focus on how the attacker came to be radicalised into violent extremism.
The terror attack has already been the subject of five investigations, beginning with a co-ordinated review by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA), Corrections and the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS).
Corrections and police carried out their own reviews, as did the IPCA, which found that the two police officers were justified in shooting Samsudeen. Mike Heron KC carried out a review of the attacker’s immigration files.
The case has influenced changes to New Zealand’s immigration and counter-terrorism laws.
Samsudeen was in and out of prison over a period of four years for possessing Islamic State propaganda and sadistic violence imagery. Photo / Greg Bowker
Samsudeen, a member of the Tamil ethnic minority group from Sri Lanka, was granted refugee status in New Zealand in 2013 after claiming his family had been tortured for their political views.
His refugee status was revoked in 2019 when it was found that it was fraudulently obtained, but complexities in New Zealand law meant he could not be deported.
The Government has now drafted a law change to allow refugees’ residence visas to be cancelled if they posed a risk to national security.
Despite the risk that Samsudeen posed, he could not be charged under anti-terror laws because planning an attack was not an offence under the legislation. The law has now been amended.
Isaac Davison is an Auckland-based reporter who covers Auckland Issues. He joined theHeraldin 2008 and has previously covered the environment, politics, social issues and healthcare.
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