Massacre in New Zealand, a killer who wanted to be seen
He recorded himself for 17 minutes on a Facebook Live broadcast while parking his car next to Hagley Park, in the city of Christchurch, left the music on and got off the vehicle with a semi-automatic weapon with names inscribed in fascist white letters and iconic dates for the extreme right.
He walked half a block, entered through the main door of the Al Noor mosque and began firing, with the coldness of someone trained, against adults and children. At times, he spoke to the audience in an anecdotal way: "There is no time to aim, there are many objectives". Then, when he returned to the vehicle and started firing down the street, he invited to subscribe to a Youtube channel.
The camera, according to preliminary versions, would be integrated to a helmet, located in an angle chosen on purpose to deceive the spectator. So he would think, even for a moment, that the deaths he saw were happening in a videogame, as Jorge Iván Avendaño, an expert in criminal investigation, explains.
It deceived even the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram filters, better trained to detect copyright violations. For an hour the Tarrant videos were available on social networks and, by the time they were deleted along with their accounts, they had already reached the rest of the world.
It was not worth while that the authorities of New Zealand warned that sharing the recording would bring 10 years of prison sentences, or that the alleged murderer and three other persons, whose link with the facts has not been clarified, were captured. The damage was done. And it was against everyone.
Look away?
Before going to the mosque, Tarrant posted on Twitter a 74-page document describing his process of radicalization against the Muslim world and justifying what he was about to do. "For the first time, people will call a fascist a real fascist," he said.
For Juan David Giraldo, head of the psychology program of the U. de Medellín, "the narcissistic structure of the aggressor is clear, which may include sociopathic tendencies in the sense of choosing a group and attacking it because of their religious beliefs".
This profile, at once unbalanced and methodical, found the means to commit the massacre in a context like New Zealand, with less than 50 homicides per year, but an access to weapons that allows even a child under 16 years to acquire a rifle, according to The New York Times Philip Alpers, member of the NGO Gun Policy, linked to the U. of Sidney.
With this fact, says Fátima Martínez, a professor of digital journalism at the Universidad del Rosario, Tarrant revealed "a society incapable of controlling its own capacity to transmit in real time. A scenario in which the media face the dilemma of how far to count. "
An unresolved dispute in which, for Fernando Ramírez, president of the board of directors of the Foundation for Press Freedom (Flip), it is preferable to inform responsibly that looking the other way.