Imam Recalls Terrifying Moments during Christchurch Massacre

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Mar. 24 (SEE) - Reading about a crime that took place is certainly different than hearing about it from an eye-witness.

Reuters just published an interview it conducted with Ibrahim Abdel Halim, the Imam at a New Zealand mosque, which was targeted in a terrorist attack on March 16 during the Friday prayers.

He told Reuters that he  was at his mosque located in the Linwood neighbourhoods of Christchurch, delivering sermon about “tasting the sweetness of faith” as a Muslim obedient to God, when he suddenly heard what he thought later to be gunshots.

It was at another mosque, Al Noor, that the gunman first began shooting. He shot at men, women and children as he emptied one clip of ammunition and then the next, circling back to shoot once more just to be sure he’d killed as many Muslims as possible. He took more than 40 lives there. The gunman then got into his car and drove to Linwood, where Abdel Halim, a man with a carefully cut white beard, was beginning to pray. 50 lives were claimed in the massacre and dozens were wounded.

Abdel Halim, 67, continued, saying that he didn’t want to stop reciting the holy words mid-sentence, so he “tried to finish the prayer quickly.”

Abdel Halim, who immigrated from Egypt to Christchurch in 1995, recalled the worst moments saying: “then the bullets came crashing through the window of the mosque. They sprayed into bodies. People screamed, ping atop each other in jumbled piles”.

Abdel Halim saw his son but could not make it to where he lay. Further back, at the partition for women, Abdel Halim’s wife was also pinned down by gunfire, shot in the arm. Bullets thudded into a friend next to her, killing the woman. In the land that had become his sanctuary, Abdel Halim suddenly feared he was about to watch his family slaughtered.

Many victims in Christchurch had sought just that – leaving Somalia, Pakistan, Syria or Afghanistan for a better life, often with little in their pockets. Abdel Halim spoke of the city as a dream made real.

After immigrating, Abdel Halim’s life grew along with the city. He opened a restaurant, named for his old home, Cairo. He became active in the Muslim community, working as the imam at a mosque called Al Noor.

When terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001, Abdel Halim was the head of a local Islamic association. At the time, he said, there was a flare up of young people yelling at Muslims and trying to grab women’s headscarves. Abdel Halim responded by organizing community events at the mosque. In 2017, he took part in opening a multi-faith prayer space at the airport. “My only weapon,” he said, “is my tongue.”

He also helped start and agreed to be the imam, of the Linwood mosque as its doors opened early last year, though it was across the city from his house. The building, a former community centre, sits amid signs for the Salvation Army, a pawnshop, the Super Liquor and the Value Mart. Its presence was a marker of growth in the city’s still-small Muslim community.

Another account was also mentioned in Reuters report. In the back of the mosque, a 27-year-old man from Afghanistan named Ahmed Khan peeked out a window. The plump-faced Khan and his family had arrived in Christchurch 12 years earlier, leaving behind a nation torn by war.

“Someone called ‘help!’ and when I looked out the window, somebody was lying down, bleeding,” he said. Khan’s eyes flitted across the driveway and spotted a strange figure – a man wearing a helmet, standing in broad daylight with a rifle in his hands.

In the prayer area, where Abdel Halim had stood reciting holy words just moments before, people flung themselves on the ground in panic. Khan recalled cradling a man in his arms one moment and then, the next, the gunman “shot him when I was holding him, in the head. And he was dead.”

There was another Afghan in the room who rushed toward the door. In the gunfire that followed, seven people were killed. Khan said the toll almost certainly would have been higher if this second Afghan - Abdul Aziz, a short, muscular man who runs a furniture shop - hadn’t confronted the shooter.

[caption id="attachment_40943" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Images taken from video taken by the gunman and posted online live as the attack unfolded[/caption]

Aziz grabbed a credit card machine and hurled it at the gunman, dodging bullets. He later chased the gunman with an unloaded shotgun that the shooter dropped as he went back for another weapon, then hurled it like a spear through his car window. With four of his children in the mosque, Aziz later said, he acted to protect his own piece of adopted homeland. “I didn’t know where my own kids were – if they are alive, if they are dead,” he said.

They’d survived, with one of his sons laid over a younger brother, protecting the smaller boy’s body with his own. Abdel Halim’s wife and son also made it out alive.