Christchurch massacre: mosque kill accused’s links to neo-Nazi sympathiser

The Christchurch shooter made a connection online with a Queensland white-genocide supporter, ‘Nazi Sparky’.

A screenshot of Smerff Electrical online.

The Christchurch shooter made a connection online with a Queensland “Nazi Sparky” who posted about “Europa” and “white genocide” — both themes of Brenton Tarrant’s bizarre manifesto.

Tarrant “liked” the 2016 post after it appeared on the Facebook page of Smerff Electrical, the business of Simon Hickey, which claimed “Europa” would “regain its spine” and stop pandering to “female voters”.

Mr Hickey said “there’s no connection” between him and Tarrant.

Despite Tarrant spending little time in Australia recently — Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on Monday said he had been here just 45 days over the past three years — The Australian this week uncovered evidence that he had connected with at least two far-right extremists.

Although the Facebook post was published in November 2016, it is unknown when Tarrant “liked” it, using the same Facebook account as the one he live­streamed his alleged terrorist attack on Friday. No further evidence of contact between them could be found, and Mr Hickey did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr Hickey became known as the Nazi Sparky in 2017, after his business sponsored neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

The Australian is not suggesting Mr Hickey had any prior knowledge or involvement in the Christchurch attack.

Smerff Electrical’s website also includes a motto used by the SS during World War II, and an image of far-right cartoon figure Pepe the Frog in a SS uniform. Tarrant’s Facebook page was deleted soon after his alleged terrorist attack; it’s unclear how he came to visit Mr Hickey’s page.

It is known that Tarrant was a visitor of the notorious internet forum 8chan, where he told other users about the attack minutes before it began.

Telecommunications companies have begun blocking access to the site, which has become a safe haven and incubator of trolling, racist and sexist behaviour embraced by far-right extremists.

Other websites, including 4chan, have also been blocked.

8chan users were sharing videos they saved of the attack well after Facebook removed the original from Tarrant’s account. Many are still celebrating the killings.

Facebook’s deputy general counsel and vice-president, Chris Sonderby, yesterday said the original video was viewed “fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast” and about 4000 times before it was taken down. He said about 1.5 million videos of the attack were taken down over the next 24 hours.

“Before we were alerted to the video, a user on 8chan posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site,” he said.

YouTube said at one point in the aftermath of the attack, there was a new upload of such footage every second on the website.

8chan’s administrators said they were “responding to law enforcement regarding the recent incident where many websites were used by a criminal to publicise his crime”.

The forum allows users to post anonymously. Administrators are able to see their IP addresses — identifiers for each computer using the site — but many of its users utilise VPNs (virtual private networks) or a Tor browser, which can give 8chan administrators an IP from a different location.

Another platform used to share those archives and the video, Kiwi Farms, has been blocked and its administrator, Joshua Conner Moon, publicly abused New Zealand police after they emailed him on Sunday to ask that he preserve any data related to those who shared the files.