Politic?: "Kiwi Scum"

"I was just buying stuff and walking toward the milk aisle and then suddenly I heard a person shouting loudly 'Allahu akbar' and just running."
"He had a knife, a pretty big knife. It was very scary ... It was four or five steps away from me, and I had a clear path to run so I ran."
"I could see one lady wearing a white T-shirt completely bleeding and really panicking. I saw another person bleeding from the shoulder really bad."
New Zealand Herald interview with 34-year-old witness

"He went past us by the aisle. This undercover cop came to me ... I was going to hit him ... The cop is like 'get back' and he started shooting him, five times and killed him."
"[One woman's] head was pushed on the food so I had to put something on it because she didn't want to get up. I gave her something for her head. She was stabbed in her head and her stomach."
Amit Nand, attack witness

"What happened today was despicable, it was hateful, it was wrong. It was carried out by an individual, not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity."
"The fact that he was in the community will be an illustration that we haven't succeeded in using the law to the extent we would have liked."
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, a 32-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil Photo: AP

With careful tenderness to avoid raising psychological hackles against Muslims, against the religion of peace known as Islam, to convince New Zealanders through a deliberate thrust of clearing the faith, the culture that arises from the faith, the faith that holds sway among a large multitude of ethnic groups and which mysteriously breeds a violent ideology of terrorism, Ms.Ardern ushers her constituency away from blame while assuring the smaller constituency that all will be well.

But there is ample blame to be apportioned in this unfortunate case which has resulted in great physical harm to innocent people, three of whom may yet lose their battle with premature death. This man was well known to police, he had a police record, he was known as an Islamist extremist and made no secret of his sympathies as a member in good standing of the Islamic State ideology of hatred and violence directed against the West.

The man was on a terror watch list, he had committed offences linked to terrorism in the past, had posted online sentiments clearly stating his Islamist extremist views. A resident of New Zealand for ten years, he had been listed since 2016 on the country's terror watch list. In July he was sentenced to a year of community supervision. The courts had ruled since he hadn't committed an offence considered sufficiently serious to be locked up, he would be closely monitored by police.

The police routinely following him believed he was merely on one of his food shopping expeditions as he entered the Countdown supermarket in an Auckland suburb. According to shocked witnesses, the man grasped a display knife to begin lashing out with it at customers "like a lunatic". To ordinary people such behaviour is unhinged, and authorities are only too happy to subscribe to the theory that anyone shouting "Alahu akbar" while attacking people is suffering from a mental illness. Preferably leaving Islam out of the debate.

The sounds emanating from the store of people screaming and running for their lives alerted the nearby surveillance police and they rushed into the store where they discharged their weapons an estimated ten times in response to being attacked themselves as they were charged by the knife-wielding Islamist. People lay on the floor of the supermarket, a woman and an elderly man among the seven knifed.

The situation is beyond strange; a man professing and proud to be a threatening Islamist who merited being under constant surveillance by a detail of police, is deployment-intense in terms of assigned man-hours and costs. Considered dangerous enough for continuous observation but not to the extent that he would be denied the freedom to walk the streets like any peaceful citizen with no thought of inflicting harm on others as an ideological commitment.

In 2016 he had posted statements on line in support of the ISIL attacks that took place in Brussels. Warned by police, he nonetheless continued his online threats ranting against "Kiwi scum". "The reality is that when you're surveilling someone on a 24-7 basis, it's not possible to be immediately next to them at all times", pointed out police commissioner Andrew Coster.