[The authorities have not released a detailed account of the police response to Friday’s massacre at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, emphasizing that officers apprehended the suspect only 36 minutes after receiving the first emergency call.]
By
Damien Cave
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Police officers on Sunday
near Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand,
one of the mosques that was attacked on Friday.
Credit Adam Dean for
The New York Times
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CHRISTCHURCH,
New Zealand — Abdul Aziz was
praying with his four sons in the Linwood Mosque when he heard the gunshots.
Rather than run from the noise, he ran toward it, grabbed the first thing he
could find — a credit card machine — and flung it at the attacker.
The man dropped a shotgun, and Mr. Aziz
picked it up. “I pulled the trigger, and there was nothing,” he recalled. The
gunman ran to his car, where he had other weapons, and Mr. Aziz followed,
throwing the shotgun at the vehicle and shattering a window.
Mr. Aziz’s actions, which he and others
described in interviews, may have prompted the gunman to speed away rather than
return to kill more people. Minutes later, two police officers from another
town who were in the area rammed the suspect’s car into a curb and took him
into custody, ending the worst mass murder in New Zealand’s modern history.
The authorities have not released a detailed
account of the police response to Friday’s massacre at two mosques in the city
of Christchurch, emphasizing that officers apprehended the suspect only 36
minutes after receiving the first emergency call.
But interviews with dozens of survivors, and
an analysis of a video recorded by the attacker as well as one made of his
arrest by a bystander, suggest that the violence ended after a near miss by the
police at the first mosque — and acts of courage during and after the attack on
the second.
If not for the two police officers, who have
not been publicly identified, and Mr. Aziz, 48, a ponytailed furniture shop
owner who fled Afghanistan a quarter-century ago, the slaughter might have
continued. The suspect had two other guns in his car, the police said, as well
as two homemade explosives.
“It absolutely was his intention to continue
with his attack,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after the arrest of
Brenton Tarrant, 28, a former personal trainer from Australia who allegedly
distributed a manifesto of white extremist hatred minutes before the rampage.
The police said 42 people were killed at
central Christchurch’s Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Mosque, and some
attributed the lower toll at Linwood to Mr. Aziz’s decision to confront the
gunman. (An additional victim died at a hospital.)
It is unclear exactly what time the gunman
entered Al Noor, which was crowded with worshipers for Friday Prayer. But the
police said that they received the first call for help at 1:41 p.m., and that
the first officers arrived there six minutes later.
The video recorded by the gunman, which was
livestreamed on Facebook, showed a man trying to tackle him inside the mosque,
only to be shot and killed.
Six minutes after firing his first shot, he
drove away. Three minutes later, a siren can be heard on the video as he is
driving to the second mosque.
The siren becomes louder, then fades,
suggesting the police and the gunman may have just missed each other, with
officers and medical personnel racing toward Al Noor as he was pulling away.
The nearest police station is less than two
kilometers from the mosque, or little more than a mile, but the responding
officers may have been farther away.
There are 827 full-time constables in the
Canterbury district, the pastoral region on the east coast of New Zealand’s
South Island that includes Christchurch and that is home to about 612,000
people. By comparison, Boston, with a population of 617,000, employs more than
2,100 full-time officers.
About 30 front-line police officers would be
on the streets of Christchurch around lunchtime on an average Friday, said
Chris Cahill, a detective inspector who is president of a local labor union for
police officers.
When that first panicked call came in, he
added, the dispatcher would have sent all of them to Al Noor.
Front-line officers in New Zealand are not
armed and for protection wear only stab-proof vests, so those responding to the
shootings would have had to pull over and retrieve weapons — a Glock pistol or
a semiautomatic M4 rifle — and ballistic armor from the trunks of their cars,
Mr. Cahill said.
The police said a special armed tactical unit
arrived at Al Noor Mosque four minutes after the first officers, or 10 minutes
after the initial emergency call.
Mr. Cahill said it normally would have taken
longer, with team members summoned to a police station to suit up. On Friday,
though, they happened to be in a training session in the city center and
wearing their gear, he said.
“Any police force in the world — to get to
the scene in six minutes, a specialist team there in 10 — that would be a
success,” Mr. Cahill said.
Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A.
counterterrorism officer now working for an American police department, agreed.
“I’d say that the police response was rather
quick in a tactical sense,” he said, noting that the officers were rushing into
a violent situation that was still unfolding — and that had been encouraged by
individuals espousing bigotry and hatred.
Still, it was not fast enough. The officers
arrived to a horrific scene, with the dead and wounded outnumbering the city’s
usual on-duty police force.
The authorities have said little about what
happened next. It is not clear when ambulances arrived or how many medical
workers came. Christchurch Hospital reported receiving several wounded victims
in cars driven by relatives.
And then the gunman attacked the Linwood
Mosque, almost four miles east of Al Noor.
“The second mosque would have been the real
confusion,” Mr. Cahill said. “Calls coming in from one, and then calls saying a
second mosque, and people saying, ‘What? Do you mean this mosque or that one?’
”
Lateef Alabi, the imam leading prayers on the
second floor of the Linwood building, said he heard a voice outside at about
1:55 p.m. so he stopped and looked out a window. He saw a man in military gear,
wearing a helmet and holding a gun.
Then he saw two bodies on the ground.
He shouted to the congregation of about 80
people to get down. The gunman turned and fired through a window. He kept
firing.
Mr. Aziz ran toward him and threw the credit
card machine, which was about the size of a large rock.
Both men were relatively short and powerfully
built. “He took five, six, shots at me,” Mr. Aziz recalled. “I dove between the
cars.”
Following the attacker, he found the shotgun,
picked it up and tried to fire it at him, but it was empty.
Mr. Aziz said his children were screaming for
him to come back, and the gunman seemed agitated, swearing and talking about
“killing you all.”
Earlier at Al Noor, the gunman had returned
to his car, retrieved another weapon and gone back inside to kill again. But at
Linwood, after Mr. Aziz threw the shotgun at the vehicle — “like an arrow,” he
said — the attacker drove away.
“It was like my mind wasn’t working,” Mr.
Aziz said. “It was automatic reaction, like anybody. I was prepared to give my
life to save another life.”
Officers arrived at the mosque soon
afterward, he and other survivors said.
Meanwhile, the authorities had begun locking
down the neighborhood and searching for the gunman.
The police said they arrested the suspect
nearby at 2:17 p.m., but they have declined to explain how they found him and
managed to capture him without an exchange of gunfire.
Officials have confirmed the officers
involved were from Lincoln, a town about 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, from
central Christchurch. Local news reports said the officers just happened to be
in Christchurch on the day of the attack.
A video recorded by a bystander about four
kilometers, or 2.5 miles, from Linwood shows the front of a police cruiser
wedged into the right side of a sport utility vehicle and tilting it up against
the curb on a leafy boulevard. The front tire of the suspect’s vehicle is still
spinning.
The suspect’s trunk is open, and one officer
with a handgun drawn is approaching the driver’s side door, which is also open.
The other officer, armed with a rifle, is circling around the front of the
vehicle to back him up.
The first officer, still with gun drawn,
pulls a rifle out of the vehicle with his free hand and tosses it on the
sidewalk. Then he pulls the suspect out and the two officers subdue him.
It is unclear if the officers or the suspect
are saying anything to one another, and whether the suspect put up a fight.
Mr. Tarrant was charged with murder on
Saturday. More charges are expected.
Charlotte Graham-McLay, Jon Hurdle and Jamie
Tarabay contributed reporting from Christchurch, New Zealand, Jin Wu from Hong
Kong, and Malachy Browne from New York.
