Updated September 4, 2021
By John Bernard McCormick
WAIPUKURAU, New Zealand — A terrorist who went unarmed into a Countdown supermarket in the Auckland suburb of New Lynn on Friday afternoon grabbed a knife off a shelf and attacked and injured seven shoppers before he was shot and killed by two armed police. The officers were part of a Special Tactics Squad (STS) who have had him under surveillance since 2016 when he was listed as a high security risk for his beliefs.
Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen was shot and killed by the police within 60 seconds of him starting his attack. He was a known ISIS supporter and was shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he tried to kill people. His home is in Glen Edin suburb of Auckland. A mosque near the New Lynn shopping center where the shooting took place was put under police guard.
The shooter came to New Zealand from Ski Lanka in 2011 and has been known to the police since 2016 and has been watched since then for his extremist ISIS views. He had not broken the law in any way since going on the watch list so he was not able to be jailed for any reason prior to the attack.
All the victims are in Auckland hospitals, three in critical condition. A shopper was trying to disarm the man and was told to step away by an undercover cop who then shot the assailant five times.
Reuters quoted shopper Amit Nand as saying, “People were running up to me saying ‘go outside because people are being stabbed’ … I saw him with a knife and then I went past him, I went by him with another guy and I told him to ‘drop the … knife’. He went past us by the aisle. This undercover cop came to me … I was going to hit him … The cop is like ‘get back’ and he started shooting him, five times and killed him.”
The STS duties include those of a SWAT team and an anti-terrorist squad.
Auckland like the rest of New Zealand is under restrictions prompted by the Delta strain of COVID 19. Most of the cases are centered in Auckland which has been under total lockdown since August 17 at midnight. So only supermarkets, chemists, doctors and fuel stations are open.
Accordingly, the Terrorist’s targets were limited to Supermarkets if he wanted to attack a business with more than a handful of people in it. Auckland is under Level 4 lockdown (Total Lockdown where people stay at home) while the rest of the Country is under level 3 –the main difference being you can do contactless shopping for a coffee, burgers or other retail shopping.
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John Bernard McCormick is chairman of the Hawkes Bay Province Friends of Israel. He is based in the town of Waipukurau