Why New Zealand intelligence failed to catch attack suspect

New Zealanders have been forceful in denouncing the March 15 mosque shooting that claimed lives of 50 Muslim worshippers. 

But amid the outpouring of public support for the Pacific island’s minority Muslim community, many are also asking how the suspected perpetrator of the gun assaults – 28-year-old Australian-born Brenton Tarrant – slipped under the radar of security agencies.

The answer, analysts say, has much to do with online radicalisation, but is also linked to authorities’ failures to adequately assess the threat posed by white supremacists, such as Tarrant himself. Some argue it is linked to the normalisation of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic views by politicians and media outlets throughout the world, including in New Zealand.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday announced a Royal Commission will investigate the mass shooting. 

“The inquiry will look at what could have or should have been done to prevent the attack,” Ardern said after her cabinet agreed on the inquiry. “It is important no stone is left unturned.”

Rise of the alt-right

Relatively few details have emerged about Tarrant, who claimed to have been inspired to commit the massacre after seeing the “invasion” of France by immigrants in 2017 and called for Turkey’s Hagia Sophia Museum to be “freed” of its minarets.

What is clear, however, is he was plugged into a global alt-right network as his online footprint on 8chan, a notorious far-right site populated by anonymous message boards full of violent language and threats, has shown.

The alt-right is a catch-all term for a number of political views stretching along a spectrum from the far right of mainstream conservatism all the way to pro-violence white supremacism.

At its heart, however, are specific threads of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and white nationalist beliefs that bind the loosely knit grouping together.

All three narratives featured prominently in a “manifesto” allegedly published by Tarrant in the minutes before the mosque shootings.

The 74-page document, which denounced immigrants as “invaders” responsible for “white genocide”, was sent to politicians, including Ardern, while footage of the gun assaults was broadcast live on Facebook.

It wasn’t the first time Tarrant is believed to have aired hateful messages. In the days before the attack, online accounts allegedly linked to the suspect also circulated white supremacist imagery and messages celebrating violence against Muslims and minorities. Local media reports have also claimed he made “regular, racist, Facebook posts”.

Analysts say part of the reason Tarrant wasn’t flagged as a threat, however, is that much of his online activity was limited to murky sites such as 8chan, where he advertised his “manifesto” and the link to the livestream in the minutes leading up to the mosque attacks.

According to Jarrod Gilbert, a senior lecturer on crime and justice at the University of Canterbury, Tarrant’s case points to the fact that adherents of white supremacism, as with other violent and fringe narratives, no longer necessarily congregate together “in physical locales”.

Instead of the traditional “bunch of street thugs hanging around on a corner drinking cheap cider and sneering at immigrants”, he said, the alt-right gather together from the privacy of their homes.

“With the alt-right and the online communities, we don’t know how big or significant they are,” Gilbert told Al Jazeera.

“[They are] very different to the skinheads of the past… They exist in bedrooms and in an international internet community connected only tenuously by hate,” he said.

‘Keyboard warriors’

For authorities seeking to shut down their vitriolic narratives, the shift in white supremacists’ approach means authorities often struggle to identify where legitimate threats may come from.

Trying to monitor just one person online is “really quite difficult”, president of the New Zealand Police Association union Chris Cahill said, let alone an entire movement such as the alt-right, which may have millions of followers worldwide.

“It’s so easy for keyboard warriors to get online and spout all sorts of stuff,” he told Al Jazeera, adding many of those filling the internet with hateful narratives may never take action “outside of their room”.

“I have some faith that police and intelligence agencies do monitor that but social media is such a vast beast and there are so many different places to hide [online],” Cahill said. “And being able to understand the mix of threat is really difficult.”

Andrew Little, minister for the country’s security intelligence agency, revealed last week authorities had been working for months on a plan for monitoring “far-right extremism” prior to the Christchurch mosque attacks. It had yet to be finalised.

“I’d like to say I wish we’d done it earlier. I wasn’t concerned until now at the pace at which they were going,” Little told the NZ Herald newspaper.

‘We are far more likely to fear outsiders’

But critics argue the reason intelligence agencies failed to catch Tarrant is that they simply did not look closely enough at the 28-year-old and the wider alt-right collective.

The reason for the oversight, they say, was institutional bias spawned by anti-immigrant Islamophobic political rhetoric around the world, including in New Zealand.

“It is safe to say we have been perhaps too focused on what we might perceive to be the usual terror suspects, the ISIS type-inspired people,” Gilbert said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) group, which swept through Syria and Iraq in 2014, establishing a self-proclaimed “caliphate”.

“We have clearly not been keeping our eye on stuff that may be a little more home-grown and has gone perhaps underneath the radar,” he said. “We are far more likely to fear outsiders than we are people from within our own. That’s not a great reality but I suspect it is a reality.”

Muslims in particular have borne the brunt of that fear, according to Muslim community advocate Guled Mire.

Mire said there had been “tremendous” surveillance of Muslims in New Zealand, pointing to racial profiling by police, airport security forces and stringent monitoring of the minority community’s online activity.

“It has not been on the same scale when it comes to white supremacist extremist views,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We in the Muslim community feel as if we have been let down, our law enforcement authorities and security agencies have failed us miserably.”