![]() In a press conference held just over two hours after the shooting, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins emphasised that the government had “spoken to FIFA organisers this morning and the tournament will proceed as planned,” with an increased police presence. The Labour Party-led government has spent $55 million on the football tournament, which is expected to be watched by two billion people around the world. The government’s immediate response to the tragedy on Thursday was to reassure the media that this was not a terrorist incident and that the FIFA Women’s World Cup starting that evening in Auckland could go ahead. We did not locate at any stage firearms in his possession.” He did not say when this occurred. Commissioner Coster told TVNZ that police had previously searched Reid’s house “when there was a threat made that implied he might want to use a firearm and kill his family. Questions remain about how Reid was able to obtain a shotgun without a firearms license and take it to his workplace. In March, he was sentenced to five months’ home detention for a serious assault of a woman, but he was allowed to continue attending work while wearing an ankle bracelet. Reid had previous convictions related to family violence. Some Australian media outlets report that Reid was sacked the day before, but this is unconfirmed. One witness told the New Zealand Herald that Reid shouted “So what you going to do to me now… what can you do,” during his rampage. Police Commissioner Andrew Coster told TVNZ that the shooting was likely “related to workplace tension,” but gave no further details. He was one of more than 100 contractors working on what is one of New Zealand’s biggest construction projects. Reid killed two men aged in their forties and injured 10 more people, including a police officer, before he was apparently killed in a shootout with the Police Armed Offenders Squad around 8:00 a.m.Ĭonstruction company LT McGuiness confirmed that the gunman was employed by a subcontractor at the site. Workers fled or hid under desks and in toilets as the shooter, 24-year-old Matu Tangi Matua Reid, made his way through the building armed with a pump action shotgun. ![]() [Photo: 7:22 a.m., police received reports of gunshots at the Deloitte office tower on Queen Street, which was undergoing renovations. “Those are very challenging issues for enforcement agencies – and I don’t think that’s just New Zealand.Police vehicles in central Auckland, New Zealand after the construction site shootings on July 20, 2023. 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. 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. 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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