New Zealand shooting: Gunman, who called himself ‘Brenton Tarrant’, painted white supremacist icons on his guns
- The gunman also played music glorifying Serbian fighters and Radovan Karadzic, who is in prison for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims
The self-proclaimed racist who attacked a New Zealand mosque during Friday prayers in an assault that killed 49 people used rifles covered in white-supremacist markings and listened to a song glorifying a Bosnian Serb war criminal.
These details highlight the beliefs behind an unprecedented, live-streamed massacre.
Some of the material posted by the killer resembled hate speech prominent in dark corners of the internet. Beneath the online tropes lies a man who matter-of-factly wrote that he was preparing to conduct a horrific attack.
The killer’s online postings identified him as “Brenton Tarrant”. Australia’s ABC national broadcaster identified a man by the same name, whose face matched that of the shooter, as a 28-year-old Australian former personal trainer who worked in the rural New South Wales town of Grafton.
At least two rifles used in the shooting bore references to Ebba Akerlund, an 11-year-old girl killed in an April 2017 truck-ramming attack in Stockholm by Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old Uzbek man.