Christchurch terror attack: book reveals the signs we didn’t see

On 19 March 2019, an Australian white supremacist murdered 51 people and injured 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, carrying out the deadliest attack in modern New Zealand history.

The terrorist is now imprisoned for life with no chance of parole after a high-profile trial and a Royal Commission of Inquiry, and despite a recent attempt to overturn his convictions and force a retrial.

Now a revealing new book by University of Auckland politics lecturer Associate Professor Chris Wilson and Master of Conflict and Terrorism Studies student Michal Dziwulski looks back at the events leading up to the attack, as well as profiling some of the many extraordinary people he deprived of their lives.

Among several key goals, He Told Us: How an Australian committed far-right terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand (Allen and Unwin, 2026) aims “to juxtapose the victims and the amazing people they were against what a loser Tarrant was,” says Wilson, as well as to fill in some major gaps in the subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry.

"We realised there was a real lack of information out there, despite a $17m Royal Commission and a major transnational investigation.”
 

They felt the Commission simply didn’t have much evidence and therefore drew weak conclusions and then declared the case closed.

"But now there's a document, this book, that tells the truth about one of New Zealand's most important events, and which proves the explanation set in stone [by the Royal Commission] is now wrong,” says Wilson.

The Commission’s key conclusion was that there was essentially nothing that could have been done to identify Tarrant as a threat in advance of the attacks, except by chance.

This was in part based on an acceptance of the terrorist’s claim that he didn't use "extreme right wing websites".

However Wilson and Dziwulski, who both specialise in white supremacist-related terrorism, decided this couldn’t be the case.

"So we went looking for him online,” says Wilson, “using forensic linguistics, looking at the way he writes, his syntax, grammar, word choice, capitalisation and various other strange things.”

And they used that knowledge to trawl through an anonymous forum called 4chan, an image-based, English-language bulletin board, where they not only identified him, but found 400 previously undiscovered posts from various countries over a five-year period leading up to the 2019 attacks.

“We map him getting more and more radical and militant, and his views change and his targets change as he takes on more ideology,” says Wilson.

Essentially they discovered Tarrant had a deep hatred of anyone who wasn’t white, which evolved over time.

"We see him [online] speaking candidly and unguardedly, which is quite different to his manifesto and statements to the Royal Commission and investigators afterwards, which was propaganda and lies.”

The book includes a whole chapter on the methods they used to identify him so resourced organisations like security agencies can learn from it and be able to identify these threats in real time, says Wilson.

Had someone been able to do this before 15 March, the red flags were all there, he believes.

"Including him saying twice while in New Zealand, and before the attacks, 'I'm going to attack mosques in the South Island.' If he did that on a public forum, why did the Royal Commission say he didn't tell anybody he was going to commit the attack or interact with anyone about it?”

Ahead of the attacks, Tarrant also visited Akaroa from his base in Dunedin, “clearly as a reconnaissance trip and not to swim with dolphins,” says Wilson, but the Commission didn’t see the trip as significant.

He says the ease with which he purchased seven AR-15 semi-automatic weapons in New Zealand is also staggering and starkly exposed the weakness in our gun laws at the time.

“Guns are very much the weapon of choice and glorified within far-right communities, which are heavily influenced by American white supremacist culture.”

However the attacks sparked a major review of the firearms laws, with then PM Jacinda Ardern banning most military-style semi-automatic firearms, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as implementing a nationwide gun buyback scheme and establishing a national firearms registry.

Wilson says the attack’s victims and their families have been very supportive of the book and had wanted “proper information and critical analysis” of how such a terrible thing was able to happen, which hasn't been provided by the Commission’s conclusions.

And there’s no doubt that the terrorist has been ‘highly successful’ according to the grotesque criteria of far-right ideologists, says Wilson.

“He's now the most influential far-right terrorist ever. He has not just inspired copycats globally, but also probably had an impact on mainstream politics, both here and around the world."

Wilson would like security agencies to be more open about what they’ve done to avoid such attacks in the future.

“They've told us numerous times that they've made really important changes since the attack, but there's been no evidence of that. Are they focused on online environments? How and where are they getting their knowledge in terms of how online environments radicalise people? Are they focused on far-right terrorism?"

All information submitted to the Royal Commission has been suppressed permanently and can’t be accessed through the Official Information Act or in any other way by researchers, says Wilson.

Justifications for this include national security and privacy issues, and the fact that the Commission claims to have considered and analysed all the information well enough that the public can have trust in the process as a full and final record, he says.

Ideally, he and Dziwulski would like to see another inquiry and for it to be opened up; with information provided, if not publicly, “at least to researchers or people in a position to analyse it properly".

"This shut case is not fair to the victims first and foremost, but it's also not fair to New Zealand, and it’s dangerous, because it’s undermining our chances of preventing something similar happening again.”

He Told Us: How an Australian committed far-right terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand (Allen and Unwin, 2026) is now widely available in bookshops and online.