- 49 people were shot dead in Christchurch, Canterbury, on Friday March 15, 2019, in the country's worst-ever mass shooting.
- This timeline shows how events unfolded.
On Friday a terrorist opened fire on worshippers at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.
The suspected killer appears to have announced his intentions in advance by posting a 74-page racist manifesto online.
The gunman live-streamed part of the attack. The prime suspect was arrested less than an hour later, by which time 49 people were dead.
Here is how the massacre unfolded in real time:
This article has been updated several times to incorporate new information.
Thursday, March 13, 2019: A man posted a 74-page racist manifesto on 8chan called "The Great Replacement" explaining why he would shortly be killing Islamic "invaders."
The man said he would carry out an attack: "To take revenge on the invaders for the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders in European lands."
The 8chan post linked to the Facebook page of a person named Brenton Tarrant.
Read a full analysis of the manifesto here.
This is who he said he was: an "ordinary White man" who "decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people."
The person said he would carry out an attack to "show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people."
The author said he had planned a deadly terror attack on Muslims in Christchurch in December 2018.
"It is a terrorist attack," the racist manifesto stated, and the author promised the massacre would be livestreamed.
The remainder of the 74-page document is an ethno-nationalist and white-supremacist diatribe about Islamic "invaders" destroying white culture.
The author describes himself as a "racist" and a "fascist."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider