(Radio NZ) A year ago today, eight shoppers were injured in a stabbing frenzy at LynnMall’s supermarket. Gill Bonnett looks back at what drove Ahamed Samsudeen to carry out New Zealand’s second terrorist attack in three years.
“Since I was a child, my ambition is becoming an engineer and to serve the society as much as I can,” Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen wrote as he prepared to study in New Zealand.
“He was an obedient and loyal student who bears a good moral character,” the Hindu College in Colombo, where the Tamil Muslim spent seven years after passing year 5 scholarship exams, said.
Yet less than six years later, he would be in the sights of government agencies battling to arrest, detain and later deport him — until his death in an Auckland Countdown supermarket on Friday, 3 September, last year.
