This quiet university town, surrounded by hills and a small harbour on New Zealand's South Island, appealed to the shooter. Local residents are asking why.
When the stocky Australian man moved into the bluish-gray house perched on a small incline in 2017, he told the young couple next door he had travelled the world and was now looking to settle down.
On the other side of the wall, Brenton Tarrant – the alleged gunman in last week's mosque massacres – was apparently planning. A flurry of activity. A police vehicle tows bomb disposal robot on the way to their investigation of the shooter's home in Dunedin, New Zealand."The other poignant feature of this for Dunedinites is, of course, the revelation that the evildoer lived among us – in my case, just three blocks away from my home," said Michael Woodhouse, a member of Parliament based here. "He was hiding in plain sight.
"This news is like hell on earth," Fitzgerald said. "We had no idea – it hurts so much. It's a hard thing to swallow."But Australia nonetheless has had to grapple with the fact that the alleged shooter was one of its own, adding to the ongoing debates over Islamophobia and racism against groups, including Australia's native inhabitants. Tarrant views Australia as "simply an offshoot of the European people", he wrote in the Twitter manifesto.
His fury grew, he wrote, as he observed the 2017 French elections. In the document, he lashed out against immigration to France in particular, claiming there were so many immigrants "the French people were often in a minority themselves".At some stage, he also went to North Korea, apparently with a "friendship association" on closely monitored tours.
"[He] didn't have any lounge furniture. But I mean, that's just quirky rather than raising a red flag or anything like that," the property manager added. "It's just like, OK, this is the way this guy lived, that's fair enough – each to their own sort of thing."Three months later, in November 2017, Tarrant obtained a gun license, a prerequisite for owning a firearm in New Zealand.
In a statement, the Bruce Rifle Club's vice president said Tarrant "seemed like a normal person and never gave anyone reason to suspect he would carry out an attack like he has". Sometime that year, he went back to Grafton to celebrate his sister's 30th birthday, according to his grandmother. Tarrant's manifesto does not mention the centre but does state that he initially was planning to attack the Al-Huda Mosque in Dunedin. Muslim community elders there say the mosque's CCTV system was stolen about three weeks before the Christchurch attacks.
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