Christchurch mosque terrorist posted about plans a year before attacks that killed 51 people
Startling new details have been revealed about the Australian man who massacred dozens of people in the NZ terrorist attack. See what has been uncovered.
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Australia’s worst mass murderer left clues on far right websites years before he killed 51 people in the Christchurch mosque attacks.
New research has found Brenton Tarrant, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 atrocity, was active on extremist forums like 4chan, bragging that Australian authorities couldn’t stop his plans to move to New Zealand to stage an attack against the Muslims he so deeply hated.
He also made threatening comments on the same extremist platform about people of colour and targeting them in places of worship as far back as 2015.
The University of Auckland researchers say their findings change what is known about the March 15, 2019 attacks Tarrant live streamed on social media.
They also contradict New Zealand’s Royal Commission into the mass-murder, which concluded he did not spend much time on far-right online sites and was mostly radicalised on YouTube.
Dr Chris Wilson, who led the research, said questions needed to be asked about why Tarrant’s obscene activity wasn’t detected earlier — and the attack, potentially, prevented.
“It’s very difficult to pick up this stuff in this massive morass of extremists language. It’s hard to identify what’s the really dangerous stuff, and we have that hindsight to be able to go back and find it,” he said.
“Having said that, there’s a few things that you would like to think that they’d be right up there at the top of a red flag type of system.”
He discussed his anger about mosques in southern New Zealand on 4chan and when users asked him what he would do about it, he told them: “I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on”.
In other threads he spoke of selling Australian property to fund an armed group to commit ethnic cleansing. He also spoke openly of his nationality and claimed Australian authorities couldn’t stop him.
“He was radicalised and was talking about violence of that kind much earlier than we thought,” Dr Wilson said.
The researchers trawled through thousands of anonymous posts dating back to 2014 on 4chan message boards and matched posts with Tarrant’s known locations as he travelled the world.
They were able to identify him as he made unique and specific grammatical errors that were matched to public posts and his 2019 manifesto.
“He started to give himself away – he talked about being from Australia and from Grafton [in NSW].”
Dr Wilson said they “went looking for him” because they didn’t believe Tarrant wasn’t active on those forums and wanted to learn more about the path to radicalisation to prevent further attacks.
“To understand why he did what he did, to understand if there were more people out there like that, to understand the way that people who go on and do those kinds of acts talk.”
Dr Wilson said it was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. But my real critique lies with why in the last five years it hasn’t been discovered why and why it’s taken us to find it and publicise it,” he said.
Originally published as Christchurch mosque terrorist posted about plans a year before attacks that killed 51 people
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