New Zealand attacker radicalized by neighbors, mother says – KXAN Austin

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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) – The mother of an Islamic State-inspired extremist who stabbed shoppers in a New Zealand supermarket, said her son was radicalized by neighbors in Syria and Iraq who helped him recover from an injury recover.

The attacker, Ahamed Samsudeen, was a 32-year-old Tamil Muslim from Sri Lanka. He came to New Zealand 10 years ago on a student visa and applied for refugee status due to persecution at home in the island nation off the south coast of India.

Samsudeen was shot dead by police who said the chaos of the attack last week in Auckland stabbed five people and injured two others.

His mother, Mohamedismail Fareetha, said his decline into extremism began after falling several floors while studying in 2016.

“Because he had no one there, it was people from Syria and Iraq who helped him. It looks like they’ve brainwashed him. Then he started posting on Facebook, “Fareetha said on Saturday in a phone interview with a local TV station from her home in eastern Sri Lanka.

“He didn’t change until he went abroad,” she added.

Police first noticed Samsudeen’s online support for terrorism in 2016, and he was arrested at Auckland Airport the following year. According to the authorities, he was on his way to Syria, presumably to join the uprising of the Islamic State. He was later released on bail.

“After his arrest in 2017, he spoke less to us, about every three months,” said Fareetha, adding that two of her other sons “were mad at him and berated him.”

In a statement on Saturday, Fareetha’s son Aroos said that his brother “would hang up the phone if we told him to forget about all the problems he was obsessed with. Then he would call us back when he found he was wrong. Aathil was wrong again yesterday. We are of course very sad that he could not be saved. “

In 2018, Samsudeen was jailed for three years after being found with Islamic State videos and knives. The following year, his refugee status was revoked after authorities found evidence of fraud. Immigration authorities tried to argue that he should stay behind bars, but Samsudeen was released in July.

The police followed him around the clock, fearing he would launch an attack but would not be able to do more. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced that her government will change laws this month to increase penalties for terrorist attacks.

Samsudeen’s family comes from Kattankudy, a coastal town 220 kilometers northeast of the capital Colombo, which is viewed by the police as a hotbed of extremism.

Since Sri Lanka’s decades-long conflict between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority ended in 2009, a religious divide has emerged.

The alleged mastermind behind the bombings on Easter Sunday 2019 in Sri Lanka, Mohammed Zahran, preached in Kattankudy an increasingly extremist version of Islam that glorified the murder of infidels. Two local Muslim groups who swore allegiance to the Islamic State were blamed for the six almost simultaneous suicide attacks on three churches and three hotels.

However, it was initially not clear whether Samsudeen had connections to extremist groups in his hometown.

Rishvin Ismath, spokesman for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka, said the government should focus on broad-scale rehabilitation, such as making changes to what is preached in mosques and reforming textbooks he believes always still contain extremist material.

“If they only focus on identified terrorists, they will not solve this problem,” he said.

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, the former head of the Sri Lankan Institute for National Security Studies, said extremist militants across South Asia could be encouraged after Taliban fighters swiftly captured most of Afghanistan and withdrew US forces last month.

“I don’t see China or Russia taking this place to balance the regional security architecture. The resulting vacuum will affect many nations, ”he said.

He also warned New Zealand lawmakers against taking too drastic steps in reforming their anti-terrorism laws that he believed could spark further radicalization.

By locking up hundreds of people, the prisons themselves could become breeding grounds for extremism, he said.

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