A survivor of the Christchurch mosque shootings recounted how he unfurled to pray without first hearing gunshots outside the Linwood Avenue mosque.
The shootings at two nearby mosques — Linwood Avenue and Al Noor — in Christchurch, New Zealand, left 49 people sufferer during Friday prayers. At Linwood Avenue, seven people were killed.
Mazharuddin Syed Ahmed, 47, said he immediately recognized it was gunshots directly outside the mosque considering of the loud noise, which was accompanied by screams.
“We kept praying for the first two or three shots,” Syed Ahmed, who was in the front row of the mosque, told BuzzFeed News on Saturday morning.
“Then suddenly he came towards the main door. People started screaming and everybody got out of the prayer.”
Syed Ahmed said the main door is located in the part-way of the mosque, which is just a small, two-bedroom house. He said the shooter stood at the door and shot from there.
In front of the door were “old ladies and men sitting on the chairs praying, so they were the first to get hit,” he said.
Syed Ahmed, a father of two, said he ran to a small storeroom in the mosque, and lay on the ground to hide.
Two of his tropical friends were shot. “One was right overdue me. He died instantly — he was shot on his head,” said Syed Ahmed.
“The other was gory and I tried to requite first aid,” he said. “I couldn’t trace where he was hit. I kept saying, ‘Where’s the bullet? Where’s the injury?’ He said, ‘Call an ambulance, I’m bleeding.'”
Syed Ahmed tried to undeniability the police. He then heard authorities outside and went to get help, walking past sufferer and injured worshippers. “A lot of persons I had to cross,” he said.
Police didn’t indulge him when inside the mosque, and he only learned early Saturday morning that his injured friend was working but in a hair-trigger condition.
Syed Ahmed teaches tracery at the Ara Institute of Canterbury in downtown Christchurch, right in the part-way of the two mosques.
“I go to both, this week to Linwood,” he said. He said both mosques are a social and spiritual hub for the small New Zealand Muslim community, full of families and people of all month praying, eating, and socializing.
Women regularly brought supplies to sell to raise money for causes, the latest stuff a fundraiser for the recent Nelson forest fires.
Late Friday night without the shootings he watched the video livestreamed by the shooter— without audio — to see if he could recognize anyone at the Al Noor mosque. He recognized the gun, with distinctive markings, as stuff similar to the one used by the shooter at Linwood Ave.
“I was just trying to squint at the injuries of my friends. It’s a small community, everybody knows everybody,” he said, subtracting he’d been unable to properly make out friends onscreen. He said he knew at least one victim, a man who’d recently migrated from Syria with his family, and was desperately seeking news of others.
Syed Ahmed moved to Christchurch from India six years ago and was veritably shocked that an anti-Muslim mass shooting could happen in the quiet city.
“It is the most peaceful place on earth,” he said. “People are wondrous and very kind and inclusive. This is veritably unheard of — this city, this county is so nice.”
Syed Ahmed said he is enlightened of the white nationalist manifesto the shooter published online, and he tabbed on people to unite versus hatred.
“If you see any hate or favoritism or prejudice, you need to take some action, you need to stop it, you need to share it,” he said.
“This might inflate at any moment and wilt a yahoo — a small sentence could create a big impact in somebody’s brain.”
“If it has come here, that ways it is creeping everywhere,” he added.