NZ terror suspect 'must have been influenced by British far right'
Governments in various countries investigate Brenton Tarrant's travel history to determine his links to the far right.
Sunday 17 March 2019 12:22, UK
Britain, the United States and other allies are looking into the travel history of the suspected gunman in the New Zealand massacre to see if he met others who share his extreme views.
Brenton Tarrant was reported to have travelled to the UK as part of a two-month tour of Europe that fed his thinking.
The Sunday Telegraph quoted a senior government source as saying he "transitted" through Britain in 2017, staying "for a few weeks".
It was not immediately possible to confirm the claim.
Bulgaria said it had launched an investigation into the movements of Tarrant after revealing he had rented a car in the Balkan state last November to visit more than a dozen cities.
Interior minister Mladen Marinov said: "We are working on determining the locations he visited, the places he used as accommodation, tracing every single step he made with all the data we can collect.
"One of our main tasks is to determine whether he had contacts with Bulgarian citizens and were there local people who escorted him."
Chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said Tarrant was in the country from 9 to 15 November. He visited a number of historic sites, appearing interested in battles between Christians and the Ottoman army.
Bulgaria said it was coordinating its efforts with counter-terrorism teams from other countries, including the United States.
It also revealed Tarrant went to Hungary after Bulgaria.
And he took a trip to the region in 2016, visiting Serbia at the end of that year as well as travelling by bus through Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.
"Credit cards are being checked so we can track the shooter's exact route," Mr Tsatsarov said on Friday night. "The investigation is ongoing."
Raised in the Australian town of Grafton, Tarrant worked at a fitness centre.
It is not known when his white supremacist thinking started and he was not on any New Zealand or Australian terrorist watch-list.
But Tarrant travelled around the world following the death of his father from cancer in 2010.
Pictures have emerged of him in Pakistan last October, and possibly even in North Korea.
He also went at least twice to Turkey in 2016 and travelled around western Europe the following year, including to France, Spain and Portugal.
In a hate-filled manifesto published online, Tarrant claimed three events in Europe in the spring of 2017 turned him to violence.
The first was an attack in Stockholm by an Islamist extremist who killed five people, including an 11-year-old girl.
The next was the election victory of French President Emmanuel Macron against the right-wing Marine Le Pen, even though he also dismissed her as "feckless".
What he described as the final push was seeing immigrant communities on his travels across eastern France in May of that year.
Olivier Guitta, head of geopolitical risk company GlobalStrat, said the far right has strong roots in France.
"He was obviously radicalised and this [his visit to France] was a field trip, if you will, to basically convince him that his views were right on target," he said.
Tarrant posted a series of videos and articles linked to right-wing extremism in Britain in the three days leading up to the attack on Friday.
He shared links on his Facebook page to speeches by British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, a man whose beliefs he said he most closely shared.
The suspect also posted an official British Army advert designed to show religious diversity by portraying a Muslim British soldier praying.
But Tarrant wrote: "Is it considered green on blue if they wear the same uniforms?"
In addition, the Australian-born suspect shared an Office for National Statistics document charting the ethnic breakup of the UK population.
The echo of British far-right ideology is a concern, according to General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of the military's Joint Forces Command.
"I am sure there must have been an influence [from the British far right]," he said.
"These extreme ideas are generally not ones you conceive of yourself.
"You are generally influenced by events or people so I suspect there has been a degree of radicalisation."