Lynn Mall Terrorist was radicalised by the State – we refuse to talk about that

LynnMall terror attack survivors suffering ‘severe trauma’ two years on

Survivors and witnesses of the LynnMall terror attack have together asked a coroner to hold a public inquest into the event.

A hearing is under way in Auckland to determine the scope and form of a coronial inquiry into the death of Ahamed Samsudeen more than two years ago.

He was fatally shot by the police after stabbing eight people in a supermarket in September 2021, shortly after his release from prison.

Coroner’s counsel Anna Adams said a group of 12 survivors and witnesses still had unanswered questions and wanted a public inquest.

“The entire event was less than five minutes. All of the survivors describe a scene of panic, chaos and fear in the supermarket during the incident.

“All of them describe fearing for their own lives and the lives of others.

“Many of them experienced terror and extreme distress at seeing the injuries that Mr Samsudeen inflicted on members of the public with a kitchen knife that he had picked up in the supermarket.

“Many of the survivors have no memory of the incident after a certain point and it’s often the point that they escaped the threat of immediate harm.”

The survivors are a group of Auckland residents, six women and six men, who were aged between 29 and 77 years at the time of the attack.

Adams said the survivors’ “primary motivations for participation in this inquiry are to support each other (especially those who suffered life-threatening physical injuries) and to try to prevent a re-occurrence of tragic events such as unfolded in Countdown”.

She said they supported holding an inquest, a public hearing.

It is VERY hard to read the report on the New Lynn Terrorist Ahamed Samsudeen and not see how our intervention as the State in his life turned an angry young man into a knife stabbing terrorist.

Everything about our interaction with Ahamed Samsudeen radicalised him, and there really has to be some exceptionally hard questions asked of almost every State Service who dealt with him because all it looks like is we manufactured a terrorist by the way we treated him.

Legitimate domestic terror threats to the State must be nullified and prevented at all costs, but fantasists who believe in a magical world of make believe need to be responded to proportionally no matter how their behaviour frightens the rest of us.

As we struggle at the height of all the economic and social pressures that are tearing us apart, I fear our fear will cause us to blunder it into something worse.

Two and a half years on from the Lynn Mall terror attack – what have we learned?

Not much, but we are repeating the fuelling of extremism.

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