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New Zealand shootings: ‘How do you tell a child some people don’t like you because you’re Muslim?’
- Sumeera Dawood, who moved from South Africa in 2016, says the attacks were ‘completely out of the blue’
- PM Jacinda Ardern alluded to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that many people affected by the shootings could be migrants
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Media adviser Sumeera Dawood, 39, her husband and their two sons regularly worship at the Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand. On Friday afternoon, their world was turned upside down when at least one gunman entered the mosque and opened fire on worshippers, killing 41 people on the spot.
Minutes later, an attack on a mosque on Linwood Avenue, a few kilometres away, brought the death toll to 49. At least 48 others are injured and being treated in hospital.
Dawood and her family were not in the mosque at the time of the shooting but immediately went on social media to make sure everyone they knew was safe.
“There’s just one person that we haven’t been able to locate and that’s a colleague of my husband who was at the mosque at the time,” she told the South China Morning Post on Friday evening. “He’s quite stressed because I haven’t been able to find him.”
Dawood, who moved from Cape Town in South Africa to New Zealand in 2016, said the attacks were “completely out of the blue”.
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