Auckland mall terror attack: NZ terrorist’s family ‘heartbroken’ over attack
The family of the attacker responsible for the NZ knife attack tell how he was radicalised as surgeons recover a knife tip from one of the victims.
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The family of the Islamic State-inspired radical responsible for a supermarket knife rampage in New Zealand say they are “heartbroken” over the terror attack.
Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, a Sri Lankan national, 32, came to New Zealand in October 2011 and was granted refugee status two years later.
According to NZ media reports, the “lone wolf” attacker was radicalised in his own living room, through ISIS-inspired social media influences.
He wounded seven people in his stabbing rampage at the Countdown supermarket at LynnMall in the Auckland district of New Lynn on Friday afternoon.
Samsudeen was killed by police within 60 minutes of the attack.
In a statement, the attacker’s brother, Aroos, said his family had been left “shaken” by the stabbing rampage.
“We hope these words will help bring some peace to your beautiful country. We are ready to help you all in the healing process no matter what it is needed from us.
“We hope to find out with you all, what happened in Aathil’s case and what we all could have done to prevent this. We are heartbroken by this terrible event. My father still doesn’t know my brother is dead because he has been missing him so much and is very ill these days.
“Unfortunately, Aathil was suffering from some mental health problems in his life. He suffered a lot during his political torture at home. We were grateful he found the country where he wanted to live.
“We saw his mental health got worse and worse during the last 10 years or so,” the statement said.
“He spent a lot of his time in prison and was always struggling with some court cases. When we heard that he was in prison in New Zealand, we thought it would do him some good but didn’t realise he would spend so much time there. He also had many problems in prison. He always wanted help and support. He told us that all the time.”
The attacker’s brother said Samsudeen’s mental health had deteriorated over the past ten years and he had “spent at lot of time online”.
“He wanted to impress his friends from Sri Lanka on Facebook. He wanted to share the sufferings and injustices. He saw himself as someone fighting those injustices.”
Surgeons operating on one of the victims stabbed in the attack found and removed the tip of the knife used by the attacker, the NZ Herald reports.
Three of the victims are still in a critical but now stable condition and a source says they are all expected to survive.
According to the NZ media, immigration officials tried to revoke Samsudeen’s refugee status in 2018, but he appealed and a final decision on whether he could be deported was still pending.
His uncertain immigration status was why he could not be identified until Saturday night, when it was lifted by a High Court judge, as anyone claiming refugee status cannot be identified by law.
As a Tamil Muslim, Samsudeen’s asylum claim was reportedly supported by physical body scars and a psychologist’s report saying he suffered from PTSD and depression.
He was watched for five years and jailed for three before authorities exhausted all avenues to keep him detained.
He was only freed in July and had been under police surveillance since.
Officers from the National Security Investigations group found his social media accounts had anti-Western ideology.
On Facebook he wrote: “One day I will go back to my country and I will find kiwi scums in my country … and I will show them … what will happen when you mess with S while I’m in their country. If you’re tough in your country … we are tougher in our country scums #payback.”
In 2017, he was arrested at Auckland Airport, where he had a one-way ticket for Singapore, after he told a person at a mosque he wanted “to fight for Isis” in Syria.
Police raided his home and found a large hunting knife and “fundamentalist material”.
There were photos of him posing with a firearm and links on his computer to where weapons and military equipment could be bought online. He was charged and later convicted of possessing Isis propaganda.
He was arrested in 2018 on charges of possessing a knife and objectionable material and was considered to be planning a “lone wolf” knife attack.
While in custody, he was further charged with assaulting guards, but attempts to have him charged under New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act were unsuccessful.
Although the man was found guilty on some charges, by then he had spent three years in prison on remand and “all avenues to continue his detention had been exhausted,” Ms Ardern said, although “risk mitigations were already underway”.
Ms Ardern added that changes to New Zealand’s counter-terrorism legislation were expected to be approved by parliament before the end of the month.
Police commissioner Andrew Coster said there had been nothing unusual about the man’s actions in the lead up to the attack, and he had appeared to be doing normal grocery shopping.
Because he had a “high level of paranoia” around surveillance, Coster said the police kept their distance, and it took more than two minutes to reach the man and shoot him after he started his frenzied stabbing spree.
“We have had no legal grounds to detain this subject. Monitoring his actions has been entirely dependent on the surveillance teams being able to maintain their cover as they watched him over an extended period,” Coster said.
Auckland is currently in Covid-19 lockdown as it battles to contain an outbreak of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
New Zealand’s worst terror attack was the Christchurch mosques shootings in March 2019, when an Australian white supremacist gunman murdered 51 Muslim worshippers and severely wounded another 40.
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