Video reveals a coward armed with murderous self-delusion

The fact the shooter sees himself as a soldier engaged in a firefight shows self-deception and arrogance that is utterly appalling.

Brenton Tarrant’s video is chilling, and more revealing than his ­manifesto.

The man who live-streamed his horrific attack on innocent worshippers attending a Christchurch mosque yesterday is now in custody, one of four people apparently arrested by New Zealand police. He appears to have posted a series of extraordinarily disturbing images on Twitter and Facebook Live, most since taken down by the sites involved, only to be rapidly mirrored and reported.

He also shared a lengthy manifesto filled with neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology, as well as with ironic and sarcastic passages seemingly designed to troll the media and the public. The videos, in particular, are revealing in three ways.

First, they show an individual clearly familiar with close-quarter combat techniques. The video begins with the shooter driving, wearing “multicam tropical” pants with kneepads and stretch panels for freedom of movement, a type commonly worn by combat troops. He wears green gloves with the fingertips cut out for dexterity, and what appears to be an open-topped chest harness with multiple loaded magazines.

In a separate image posted on social media, the shooter’s body armour vest is depicted, complete with a neo-Nazi “Black Sun” emblem. It is unclear from the image whether the military-style vest (readily available for purchase online) includes the necessary ceramic plates to make it bulletproof; these are much harder to come by.

He has a helmet camera, used to live-stream the attack as well as record a jubilant commentary while driving.

In the Subaru vehicle’s front passenger seat-well are three ­rifles; he has another by his right leg as he drives; and one more is in the car’s boot along with an automatic shotgun and several red petrol cans, covered in sheets with the “New Zealand Proud” logo. Later police reports suggest that these may have contained improvised explosive devices, probably incendiary or blast bombs.

In the portion of the video that shows the attack, the shooter rapidly reloads several times, showing good weapon skills and a degree of calm. The rifle used in the shooting is a semi-automatic AR-15 type, derived from a military model but also obtainable in some countries on the open market.

It is mounted with a miniature reflex optical sight, a type of combat optic that helps a shooter quickly identify targets at close quarters, and has a barrel-mounted strobing torch, used to dazzle a target. The shooter switches the dazzle light on while still in the car before exiting, walking calmly down the street and into the mosque, then opening fire.

After shooting multiple defenceless people in quick succession, he returns to the vehicle for more ammunition before going back into the mosque, moving from victim to victim and shooting multiple “double taps” into anyone still moving or whom he seems to have thought might be playing dead.

One heroic man appears to try to tackle him in a corridor, only to be quickly gunned down.

Based on this, the shooter seems either to have some professional training, to have watched or played realistic first-person-shooter video games, or is copying the clothes, style and behaviour of combat troops seen on television or internet videos.

Second, the white writing on the shooter’s weapons reveals much about his ideology. It includes the “Odal” rune, a Nordic symbol co-opted by neo-Nazis because of its association with concepts of heritage, legacy and inheritance, and the expression “14 words”, referring to an American white supremacist slogan that states “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”. Several refer to famous anti-Muslim battles — the number “1571” referring to the battle of Lepanto, “1683 Vienna” to the defeat of an Ottoman invasion of Europe, “John Hunyadi” to a medieval Hungarian fighter against the Ottomans, and “Tours 732” to a French victory over invading Arab armies.

On the top of his weapon is the name of Ebba Åkerlund, an 11-year-old Swedish girl murdered in 2017 in Stockholm by an Uzbek asylum-seeker, and another marking references to Alexandre Bissonnette, a white supremacist convicted of murder last month for a January 2017 mass shooting at the Sainte-Foy mosque in Quebec.

Finally, one of the weapons in the Subaru’s boot shows the marking “this machine kills commies” — a seemingly incongruous quote compared with the rest of the ­graffiti but in fact a reference to the video game Fallout: New Vegas, that has become common on T-shirts and stickers in American gun culture, and which has been co-opted by several Islamophobic and far-right groups. The Bissonnette and Åkerlund references highlight the final point to note about the shooter’s video: its self-referential nature.

Like Anders Behring Breivik, who committed a mass shooting and bombing in Oslo in 2011, this shooter clearly sees himself as part of a militant movement fighting back against Muslim encroachment into Europe and other Western societies. His references to historical ­battles, some of them more than 1000 years ago (and all of them in Europe) suggest he sees himself as part of a tradition of defending ­European civilisation against Islam.

Some of the writing is in Cyrillic script, and music playing in the background at one point in the video appears to come from the anti-Muslim propaganda video “Serbia Strong”, produced by Bosnian Serb soldiers during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

This suggests ties to social media memes that have flooded the internet in recent years — this being a reference to the “remove kebab” meme, which anti-Turk graffiti on one weapon also echoes.

This is horrific, chilling stuff. It suggests that neo-Nazi, white supremacist and Islamophobic rage has reached New Zealand, of all places, having infested the globe from its European and North American roots. The fact an Australian is allegedly involved will unfortunately come as no surprise to those who track similar developments here. It also suggests that combat skills and equipment of the sort used by professional soldiers, as well as the related close-quarter-battle techniques, can be picked up and used by any individual inclined to do so — whether as an individual, or perhaps as part of an organised cell group seeking broader impact.

And the references to viral memes, first-person-shooter video games and online videos indicate how powerful a transmission belt for atrocious ideas such social media have become.

One final comment: while driving, the shooter refers, in a disgustingly self-congratulatory manner, to his own weapon skills, boasting about how rapidly he changed magazines during the “firefight”.

But this was not a firefight: it was a vicious, unprovoked slaughter against innocent worshippers peacefully going about their business in a public place.

The fact the shooter sees himself as a soldier engaged in a firefight shows self-deception and arrogance that is utterly appalling. Unfortunately, such sentiments are common — Breivik expressed similar ideas in his manifesto, and other shooters have openly ­extolled their own supposed ­warrior virtue while committing acts of terror against unarmed ­civilians. But this video — and his actions — show him to be not a warrior but a coward.

David Kilcullen is The Weekend Australian’s contributing editor for military affairs