The Christchurch mosques inquest: what we know so far

The inquest into the Christchurch mosque massacres has unexpectedly become a source of national shame and embarrassment.

A procession of witnesses has appeared before deputy chief coroner Brigitte Windley with evidence of a confused and chaotic response from police and ambulance services. New Zealand has no reason to feel guilty about the atrocity itself, which was the act of a lone outsider, but the failings of the first responders have come as a shock.

Perhaps the most damning revelation so far is that paramedics took half an hour to enter the Al Noor mosque, apparently because it was St John’s ambulance policy not to enter unsafe scenes.

Several police witnesses told of calling for ambulances, to no avail. One member of the armed offenders squad ran out onto Deans Avenue several times to see why no ambulances were coming. He could see them parked up the road, presumably waiting for the all-clear.

When bystanders asked why no ambulances had arrived, the police officer told them to put the wounded into private cars and rush them to hospital. Think about that: amateurs had to be asked to save lives when skilled professionals were standing by, only a stone’s throw away.

The inquest heard that a wounded survivor, Zekeriya Tuyan, was on his phone to emergency services for half an hour before medical help arrived. Tuyan himself died weeks later.

Eventually a St John’s paramedic entered the mosque knowing he was acting contrary to instructions. “There were human beings inside that needed help,” Dean Brown told the inquest.

Was this an example of the precautionary principle that appears to have taken hold of the bureaucratic mind? The precautionary principle holds that all risk must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards – even, it seems, in emergencies where insistence on following the officially prescribed procedure can be the difference between life and death.

Thank God there are still situations where human initiative, courage and compassion kick in and the rulebook is set aside. Dean Brown was a shining example and so were the helicopter pilots who defied a bureaucratic edict by risking their lives rescuing survivors from Whakaari-White Island – another tragedy that showed by-the-book New Zealand officialdom in a very poor light.

Almost as shockingly, the dead, the dying and the wounded in Christchurch were abandoned altogether for 10 minutes after the police left Al Noor to respond to reports of the second massacre at the Linwood mosque. An AOS member told the survivors that help was on the way, which he assumed to be true. It’s impossible to imagine how they must have felt: dozens dead, others dying, and they were left alone with not even a reassuring voice to comfort them.  

These were the most startling revelations of the inquest so far, but there have been others.  

They included the disclosure that an inexperienced police call-taker who took a 111 call giving advance information about the shootings, from an email sent to Parliament by the perpetrator Brenton Tarrant, treated it as only priority 2. The inquest was told the call-taker may have been influenced by a suggestion from the caller, a parliamentary staff member, that the email was from a nutter.

That call obviously came too late to prevent the slaughter at Al Noor, but it might have given the police time to get to the Linwood mosque before Tarrant struck a second time. A police dispatcher seemed to think so, and that things might have turned out differently if the call had been categorised as priority 1. It will fall to the coroner to decide whether that was a missed chance.

Astonishingly, the police inspector in charge of national communications centres at the time defended the categorisation of the call as priority 2 because it was “general” in nature. In fact it wasn’t; Tarrant’s email was detailed and precise, even identifying the three mosques that he intended terrorising (the third was in Ashburton).

Of course it’s easy to be wise after the event. There was no precedent in New Zealand for the Christchurch mosque massacres. The Royal Commission of Inquiry in 2020 established that they couldn’t have been anticipated. Events unfolded with bewildering speed and police couldn’t be sure at first whether Tarrant had accomplices who might still be at the scene.

Human error in such circumstances is hardly surprising. Only those present at the carnage and its immediate aftermath could know how traumatic and confused it was.

That said, police and emergency services are supposed to be prepared for unexpected and extreme events. That’s the nature of their job. Evidence given at the inquest points to shortcomings, such as a known communication problem between police and St John’s, that were recognised and could have been obviated. The frustration of some witnesses was obvious.

On the upside, we shouldn’t forget that Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the shooting started by two courageous and quick-thinking country cops who happened to be in Christchurch for a training day. Their actions, which thwarted Tarrant’s intention to attack the Ashburton mosque, served as a reminder that for all the benefits of thorough planning and training, there’s sometimes no substitute for intuitive, decisive, on-the-spot action.

But in other respects the response appears to have been almost scandalously shambolic, which may shake New Zealanders’ confidence in the people we rely on to protect human life. Only two weeks into the inquest and with another four to go, it’s already obvious that Windley will have a lot to chew on.

Update (6.15pm): In News First's report of the inquest tonight, the acting paramedic in charge at the scene said police were concerned about the possibility there was an IED (improvised explosive device) at the mosque. He appeared to acknowledge that waiting for the scene to be made safe could have cost lives, but he disputed that the ambulances were "simply stopped" a block from the mosque. He said they were treating victims there.