Deporting dangerous refugees wouldn’t be necessary of we didn’t radicalise them in the first place!

Dangerous refugees would be stripped of residence under new law

Refugees’ residence visas will be cancelled if they pose a risk to national security, under government legislation introduced last month.

A review following a suspected terrorist attack in an Auckland supermarket four years ago found it was not possible under international law to take immigration action against refugees who security services believed were dangerous.

Even after Ahamed Samsudeen’s refugee status was cancelled in 2019 due to fraud – discrepancies in his asylum claim – it was believed he would still qualify as a protected person under the Immigration Act, and so it was unlikely he could be deported.

That meant he also could not be detained after his time in prison, and in the two months before the LynnMall attack in 2021 security services and the police could only monitor his movements.

He seriously injured four women and a man with a knife during the attack at Countdown in LynnMall before he was shot dead by police who were following him.

Former justice minister Andrew Little said in the wake of the attack there was an “intolerable tension” in protecting someone who risked the lives of others. The government introduced a law which made the planning or preparation of a terrorist act a criminal offence.

The new legislation, introduced last month, would still not allow would-be terrorists to be deported – but they could have their residence visas cancelled and replaced with temporary ones.

Ummmmmm.

Deporting dangerous refugees wouldn’t be necessary of we didn’t radicalise them in the first place eh?

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.

3 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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