![]() It was then that Wahabzadah said he returned to the mosque to discover the scope of the violence. He said he continued chasing after him but the shooter did a U-turn and raced off. “When he sees me I am chasing with a gun, he sat in his car”, Wahabzadah said. “And I just got the gun and throw it on his window like an arrow and blast his window. He thought probably I shot him or something and then he drive off." Wahabzadah told CNN he ran after the shooter and picked up a discarded weapon of the gunman, which he described as a “shotgun." He threw it at the gunman’s car, shattering his window. Wahabzadah said the shooter then dropped his weapon and ran back to his car. Wahabzadah said he thought the shooter went to get more weapons from his car. A spokesperson for Twitch said the company removed a livestream by the Buffalo grocery store massacre suspect less than two minutes after the violence started. Wahabzadah’s four children were inside the mosque. “I was screaming at the guy, ‘Come here, I’m here’," Wahabzadah told CNN. "I just want him to put more focus on me than go inside the masjid (“mosque”). But unfortunately, he got himself to the masjid.” He threw the credit card reader at the suspect while shouting at him in an attempt to distract the shooter away from the mosque. ![]() Wahabzadah grabbed a credit card reader and ran outside the building. (AP/Mark Baker)Ībdul Aziz Wahabzadah says he was inside Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a gunman opened fire. Multiple people were killed during shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers. “Those are very challenging issues for enforcement agencies – and I don’t think that’s just New Zealand.Police stand outside a mosque in Linwood in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15. I don’t have any power to classify a lot of ,” he said. A lot of the recent attacks are based on that concept of “great replacement” theory and the disinformation that is built around that. “The other challenge is the underlying reasoning and rationale that this form of hate crime is based on. It normalises as something that is … inevitable”.Īblett-Hampson told the Guardian that while the censor’s office had banned the alleged shooter’s specific manifesto, there was a variety of material surrounding it that did not reach New Zealand’s legal thresholds for a ban. “It doesn’t glorify it, but it doesn’t also push back on it. But he had concerns that its propagation meant it could spread to audiences who were receptive to radicalisation. Many of the groups sharing the Buffalo material online were not directly glorifying it, Hattotuwa said – some believe it was a “false flag” or “distraction” set up by elites to divert attention. “The anti-vax landscape ones who are front and centre, distributing, propagating and amplifying this content – that’s an entirely new phenomena that wasn’t there in March 2019,” he said. Within those groups, the Buffalo material was already spreading, he said, with several accounts that appeared to be expressly set up to disseminate the video and so-called manifesto. Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Anti-vaccine factions had intermingled with far right and Q-Anon groups, and developed new, conspiratorial and extreme communities, typically hosted on Telegram. While it’s impossible to track the true number if people who have viewed the material on platforms such as Telegram, Hattotuwa said that New Zealand’s fringe and misinformation-spreading ecosystems had grown dramatically since the Christchurch attacks in 2019. At least 49 people were murdered Friday at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in an attack that followed a grim playbook for terrorism in the social media era. Within New Zealand, researchers are concerned about the spread of copies of the alleged Buffalo terrorist’s propaganda, and say the country has developed fertile ground for extreme material among the pandemic era’s conspiratorial and anti-authoritarian movements.ĭr Sanjana Hattotuwa, who studies disinformation and fringe online communities for Te Punaha Matatini research centre, said the researchers had observed the Buffalo live stream video and propaganda material spreading extensively within New Zealand groups they monitored.
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