When the Christchurch massacre victims met the murderer in court, they shared their pain but also their strength

A thick ring of concrete pillars formed a blockade around the high court. On the roof, police snipers lay watchful. More police with guns stood guard in the corridors. All regular legal business was cleared from this week’s schedule. The building was otherwise empty, save for the solemn, defiant procession of victims who chose with great courage to come face-to-face with a mass murderer - to breathe the same tainted air.

On the first day, 24 people spoke, 32 on the next, and more than 30 on the third. Each of them had been wounded or had lost loved ones when, on 15 March 2019, 29-year-old Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant entered the Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and calmly executed 44 worshippers before driving to the nearby Linwood Islamic Centre and killing seven more.

Four days of almost unendurable hearings at the barricaded court in Christchurch ended overnight with a sentence of life in prison without the chance of parole. Tarrant pled guilty in March this year to 51 counts of murder, 40 of attempted murder, and one terrorism charge, meaning that a trial (expected to drag on for months) was never held. It is New Zealand’s most severe sentence for the most severe crime in its recent past, and though it will barely sew up raw wounds, it is a comfort to know this butcher will never see the outside world again.

On Monday, the court heard for the first time a detailed description of the facts, revealing a plan of atrocity even more destructive than what Tarrant was able to realise. He had plotted for two years, meticulously scoping his targets, exploiting gaps in firearms law to acquire weapons, preparing a manifesto which became his justification to the world. Before he was arrested on the warm afternoon of 15 March, he schemed to carry out further atrocities at a third mosque. His car was rammed with petrol cans – evidence that he wanted to incinerate those houses of faith. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, police stated, he claimed he wanted to kill more people.

Again and again, the surviving victims and families of the dead described to the court the steely resolve of the killer: his glassy, emotionless eyes, the methodical aiming of his shots. Tarrant himself looked gaunt and pale, shackled in the dock. He barely responded as, one after the other, the mourners addressed him directly. Many of them, defiant in their religion, forgave him even as they laid out their hearts, and their pain.

Janna Ezat described having her son Hussein’s body returned to her still punctured with bullet holes on her birthday. “He used to give me flowers for my birthday,” she said, “but instead I got his body.” Even then, Ezat forgave her son’s killer. “I decided to forgive you Mr Tarrant because I don't have hate. I don't have revenge.” Dr Maysoon Salama lost her son, too. “What was in his mind when he realised he is departing this life to his last journey?” she asked. “What is life going to be like without him around? Losing my beloved son is like feeling the pain of labour again and again.”

For some, forgiveness was not possible. They filled the courtroom with their rage, their contempt. Ahad Nabi, wearing an Afghan pakol and a rugby league jersey, who lost his father, gave Tarrant the finger with both hands and described him as a “peasant,” the “scum of the world” and “the trash of society” who deserved to be “buried in a landfill.” Others bitterly denounced him as a “devil” and a “coward.”

In this extraordinarily painful situation, Judge Cameron Mander acted less as an ordinary legal arbiter than a kind of sombre master of ceremonies, tenderly handling the sensitivities of the victims and their families, imposing strict rules on media coverage, and finally, guarding against the threat that Tarrant might use the narrow legal confines of the hearings to propagandise.

Yet what was feared never came. Tarrant did no grandstanding. A Department of Corrections report based on interviews with the killer revealed only contradictions, leaving the question of why he pleaded guilty to those charges, months before a trial was due to be held, unanswered. It was merciful for the victims and their families, but it broke with his entire ideology.

In his manifesto, Tarrant identified himself explicitly as a fascist (not a “white supremacist” or an “identitarian” or “nationalist,” as so many press reports claim) and gave only two role models he admired: the British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosely and Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik. Indeed, every action pointed towards an open emulation of Breivik, including using the court as a stage complete with the sharp shocking spike of a Sieg Heil salute. And by his sentencing, he was supposed to become a martyr.

Instead, his body will wither behind barbed wire. The unflinching words and the resolute example set by those who came to testify, to honour memory, will endure. But such extraordinary bravery on the part of those survivors and their loved ones should not be the full stop, the screwed lid on the casket of this awful episode. One need not imagine battalions of blackshirts tucked in alcoves and cupboards, under beds and in sewers, waiting to strike, to acknowledge that the fascist threat is present, imminently dangerous, and requires a resolute response to obliterate it. In this fight, the strength of those families must be our strength too.

James Robins is an award-winning journalist and historian. His first book, When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, is out in November