Ahamed Samsudeen from his New Zealand visa application (left) and when he was in prison (right). Photo: Supplied
A year ago today, eight shoppers were injured in a stabbing frenzy at LynnMall’s supermarket. Gill Bonnett looks back at what drove Ahamed Samsudeen to carry out New Zealand’s second terrorist attack in three years.
“Since I was a child, my ambition is becoming an engineer and to serve the society as much as I can,” Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen wrote as he prepared to study in New Zealand.
“He was an obedient and loyal student who bears a good moral character,” the Hindu College in Colombo where the Tamil Muslim spent seven years after passing year 5 scholarship exams, said.
Yet less than six years later, he would be in the sights of government agencies battling to arrest, detain and later deport him – until his death in an Auckland Countdown supermarket on Friday, 3 September last year.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it was a terrorist attack, New Zealand’s second such tragedy – but this one came from a known threat.
Samsudeen injured eight people, most with stab wounds, before specialist undercover officers confronted him and shot him dead. He had been monitored since 2015 because of his interest in Islamic State, and he was arrested at Auckland airport in 2017. The authorities believed he was a threat to national security and that he was trying to join ISIS in Syria.
He spent most of the next four years on remand in jail.
Preparing for his trip to New Zealand in July 2011, where he was to study a diploma in electronics and telecommunications, Samsudeen explained his career path in the application documents for his student visa.
Courses he had already taken included diplomas in information technology, programming and hardware technology, a certificate in English and diploma in web designing at the British College of Applied Studies in Sri Lanka.
But after arriving in Auckland, he told refugee officers that his parents told him to flee Sri Lanka and seek asylum after he and his father were abducted and tortured.
His father had refused to let members of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) hide weapons at his school in the years before Samsudeen was born in 1989. By the time Samsudeen was 15, the Karuna paramilitary group had abducted his father, trying to get some documents and recordings about secret meetings with government ministers. The torture he and his father suffered was later detailed in his appeal.
He left the course he was enrolled on at an Auckland college and applied for asylum, but struggled to get by.
His immigration adviser described him as “destitute”, as he tried to get a work visa while he waited for a decision. He reported he could not get a refund from the Auckland college he was enrolled at and a staff member threatened to report him to immigration when he asked for the refund. He wrote a letter to immigration explaining his plight.
Ahmed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen appears in the High Court in Auckland on 7 August 2018. Photo: New Zealand Herald / Greg Bowker
The college told RNZ it had no record of Ahamed Samsudeen on its database of past or present students.
He was recognised as a refugee on appeal and worked casual jobs such as bar work, living in Housing New Zealand accommodation.
But the 32-year-old was struggling with the trauma and violence he had suffered and witnessed in Sri Lanka.
He appeared on the security service (SIS) radar in 2015 because of his Facebook posts and the following year he was spoken to and formally warned by police about his online activities. A year after, he was arrested at as he checked in for a flight to Singapore.
The Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA), Office of the Inspectorate at the Department of Corrections, and Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security have been carrying out a coordinated review since last September.
The IPCA said it was due to be finished by August, but its release would be delayed while it was checked for classified information. Its government terms of reference did not include immigration or mental health services.
Samsudeen denied charges against him throughout his time in jail, claiming “a Syrian friend told him to put things on Facebook”. Questions hang over whether he was in fact planning to fight in Syria and if – and when – he had been radicalised.
Police found a knife and extremist material at his home, and when he was on bail a year later they charged him with a similar set of offences. He then remained on remand in custody until July last year, two months before the supermarket attack.
His convictions were two offences of using a document for pecuniary advantage, failing to assist the police in their exercise of a search power and representative charges of knowingly distributing restricted material; later possessing an objectionable publication and failing to assist a police officer.
Meanwhile, authorities were cancelling his refugee status but his appeal was delayed, and authorities were told they could not deport him or detain him longer in prison.
Justice Fitzgerald did not accept Samsudeen’s explanation that he was listening to Islamic State ‘nasheeds’ – hymns – to improve his Arabic language skills.
“Rather, I accept that the broader context to your possession of these nasheeds, which included a range of other materials relating to Isis or Isil, suggests that you have an operative interest in Isis.
“In other words, I do not accept that you might have simply stumbled across these and other Isis-related materials in your research of Islam or the historic Islamic State,” she said.
Corrections provided a statement after Samsudeen’s death, saying he refused to engage with attempts to provide him with mental health support, and was aggressive and violent.
But there have been complaints that the official narrative of what happened to him had been selective in the information it provided.
SIS noted in a briefing that Corrections does not provide programmes focused on mitigating the risk of radicalisation, instead applying management strategies such as segregation.
A criminologist who deemed the LynnMall attacker ‘low risk’ in 2018 believed there were missed opportunities to steer him away from violent extremism.
Samsudeen’s segregation was at Paremoremo, the same unit where Brenton Tarrant was jailed for killing 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand’s first terror attack.
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The government is considering how it can change the law to deport people who pose a threat to national security.
The Auckland terrorist’s immigration history is a glaring omission in the review of events leading to the 3 September attacks, National says.
The Security Intelligence Service was calling the LynnMall knife attacker a terrorist for years, at the same time as courts were hearing he was a high, medium or even low-risk threat.
Newly released documents reveal the LynnMall knife attacker was assaulted twice in prison by other inmates, and blamed for starting a third fight.
A criminologist who deemed the LynnMall attacker ‘low risk’ in 2018 believes there were missed opportunities to steer him away from violent extremism.
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