Three people have been killed in a shooting in Auckland central business district today, including the gunman.

Six people were also wounded, including two police officers.

Police say the situation is now contained.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told media a witness called the incident in at 7.23am, reporting there was a man with a gun shooting inside a construction site on lower Queen Street.

The gunman moved through the construction site shooting a pump-action shotgun.

When he reached the upper levels he hid inside an elevator shaft.

Police attempted to engage with him, but the gunman fired further shots, before he was found dead a short time later, they say.

The New Zealand Herald reports Prime Minister Hipkins praised the “heroic” actions of emergency services.

He said there was no identified “political or ideological motivation” for the shooter and as such, there was no need to change the national security risk.

The government has spoken to FIFA organisers today and the Women’s Football World Cup tournament will proceed as planned with the opening match tonight between New Zealand and Norway.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster later confirmed the dead gunman was on home detention and had previous convictions. He was named as Matu Tangi Matua Reid, 24, reports RNZ News.

Coster said the shooter was a worker at the construction site, and had an exemption from home detention to go to work.

At 7.22am police received multiple emergency calls about a person shooting a gun on the third floor of a building under construction on lower Queen Street. Commissioner Coster said officers arrived on the scene within minutes.

“The offender made his way up the building site, discharging his firearm on multiple occasions. Police entered in the building within 10 minutes,” he said.

The police commissioner said the gunman fired at police, wounding an officer, and shots were then exchanged.

“The offender was later found deceased.”

The wounded police officer was taken to hospital in a critical condition, but has since stabilised.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A scene examination is continuing at a construction site in central Auckland after a fatal shooting there shocked the city yesterday morning.

The gunman, 24-year-old Matu Tangi Matua Reid, was on home detention but allowed to work at the construction site.

He died at the scene in a shoot-out with police after killing two civilians with a pump-action shotgun. Six others were wounded, including two police officers.

The horror unfolded on the opening day of the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup in Auckland and a minute’s silence for the shooting victims was held at the first game at Eden Park last night when New Zealand defeated Norway 1-0.

Police officers in high-vis vests have today re-entered the high-rise building on the corner of Queen and Quay streets and at least seven police cars are at the cordoned off site.

A man working on the repairs at nearby Queen’s Wharf told RNZ the rules had been tightened at their site and people entering were being checked.

A commuter said there appeared to be extra security at Britomart Station transit hub this morning but he felt safe.

“It was every emotion yesterday,” he said, but he thought the city had coped well in the aftermath of the ‘shock and horror’ of the morning’s events.”

Brown said he supported Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s decision to call for a rahui in the CBD area, and the FIFA fan zone on Quay Street had been closed.

Ngāti Whātua has said this morning that no rahui is in place.

“[The] fan zone was right hard up against the dreadful event and it just didn’t seem to be right to be having a night of celebration right next door to something that had been so horrible,” he said.

“Ngāti Whātua called for, and I supported, a rahui on the area down there so we shut the fan zone and people, with a sad tinge, did go to the game at Eden Park, but with respect.

“They had the one minute’s silence, which was part of our culture and the correct thing to do, and then there was a wonderful game afterwards so, I think … the city took it well.”

‘Good end to dreadful day’
Brown said he had spoken to Prime Minister Chris Hipkins after last night’s match between New Zealand and Norway and they had agreed it was “a very good end to a dreadful day”.

He said FIFA officials had been “very sympathetic” about the shooting.

“They were very understanding, they were very concerned about the impact on the tournament, but also deeply respectful of the losses of — almost innocence — of the people here in Auckland CBD, plus of course the dreadful loss of life from this shocking experience.”

While he had been one of the people raising concerns about ongoing crime issues such as ram raids in Auckland, Brown said he was not thinking about anything on the scale of what occurred yesterday.

“It’s something out of the ordinary and I think this is one random person … and we shouldn’t possibly extrapolate that across the district, but crime on the streets with the ram raids is something which has got to be dealt with.”

Brown had praise for both the police and members of the public regarding how they responded to the unfolding crisis on Thursday morning.

“The police were wonderful, they responded bravely and promptly,” he said.

“People behaved very well considering what an appalling thing had happened.”

Violence like this has no place in city, says Swarbrick
There would be a time for political debate and discussions about how to prevent incidents like yesterday’s shooting, Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick told Morning Report, but that time was not right now.

“I very, very strongly want the message to be here that this violence has absolutely no place in our city or in our country, and we utterly reject it,” she said.

Swarbrick said her thoughts were with the whānau and friends of those who had died as well as those who had been injured, emergency service staff, and the workers who had experienced the traumatic event.

She said questions had been put to police officials at a briefing she attended yesterday, including about how the shooter had obtained a gun without a licence and while he was on home detention.

Swarbrick expected those questions would be answered “in due course” but said it was important the facts were “crystal clear” first.

“I don’t think that anyone benefits from politicians speculating in a vacuum of facts.”

The briefing had made it “very clear that this was a tragic but isolated incident connected to the workplace and that there is no outstanding associated risk”, she said.

Asked whether she believed a broader inquiry was needed to look into the use of home detention, Swarbrick said a number of reports commissioned by successive governments had identified evidence-based policies to address what was a complex issue, but that evidence was often “politically unpalatable”.

The rhetoric and debate around law and order was often reduced to “soundbyte-solutions”, she said, “things that politicians know will not work and oftentimes are contrary to evidence”.

She said New Zealanders deserved evidence-based interventions when it came to tackling crime.

“It is really clear what we have to resource in terms of evidence-based policy but it is the crunchy and the hard stuff which looks meaningfully at prevention, it’s not this knee-jerk ‘tough-on-crime’ nonsense.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

My daughter came into the kitchen early today to tell me her friends were downtown in Auckland at Britomart, the transit hub of New Zealand’s biggest city, and that a construction worker had just run past them saying a man with a gun was shooting people.

I immediately swept all the online news media and saw nothing and was in the process of suggesting to her that maybe her friends were pranking her when it broke on Breakfast TV.

I know the area this shooting occurred in well — I was there a few days ago; most Aucklanders will know it as it is a vital entry point to downtown Auckland. To have a mass shooting event there is utterly outside the norm for Aucklanders.

As the reverberations and shock ease, there will of course be immediate political fall out.

Before all that though, first, let us acknowledge the uncompromising courage of our New Zealand police and emergency services. We all saw them sprint into that building knowing someone was armed and shooting people.

I am the first to be critical of the NZ Police, but on this day, their professionalism and unflinching bravery was one of the few things we can be grateful for on such a poisoned morning.

Let us also pause and mourn the two who were killed and 10 wounded. These were simply good honest folk going about their day of work and not one of them deserved the horror visited upon them by 24-year-old Matu Tangi Matua Reid.

Now let’s talk about Matu.

Troubling pump-action shotgun access
The media have already highlighted that he was on home detention for domestic violence charges and was wearing an ankle bracelet. This is of no surprise nor shock, many on home detention have the option of applying for leave to work — we do this because those on home detention still need to pay the rent, far more troubling was his access to a pump-action shotgun he didn’t have a gun licence for.

We know he had already been in a Turn Your Life Around Youth Development Trust programme.

Political partisans will try and seize any part of his story to whip into political frenzy for their election narrative and we should reject and resist that.

The banality of evil always tends to be far more basic than we ever appreciate.

There is nothing special about Matu; he is simply another male without the basic emotional tools to facilitate his anger beyond violence. In that regard Matu is depressingly like tens of thousands of men in NZ.

His background didn’t justify this terrible act of violence today and his actions can’t be conflated to show Labour are soft on crime.

Another depressing violent male
Matu is just another depressing male whose violence he could not control. There are tens of thousands like him and until we start focusing on building young men who have the emotional tools to facilitate their anger beyond violence, he won’t be the last.

He has shamed himself.

He has shamed his family.

He has shamed us all.

Today isn’t a day for politics, it is far too sad for that, the politics will come and everyone will be screaming their sweaty truth, but at its heart this is about broken men incapable of keeping their violence to themselves.

What a sorrowful day for my beautiful city.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Two people have been killed in a shooting in Auckland central business district today.

At least six people are also wounded, including police officers.

Police say the situation is now contained and the shooter is dead.

They were alerted to the incident when someone discharged a firearm inside a construction site at about 7.20am.

The gunman moved through the construction site discharging his pump action shotgun, police say.

When he reached the upper levels he hid inside an elevator shaft.

Police attempted to engage with him, but the gunman fired further shots, before he was found dead a short time later, they say.

The New Zealand Herald reports Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has praised the “heroic” actions of emergency services.

He said there was no identified “political or ideological motivation” for the shooter and as such, there was no need to change the national security risk.

The government has spoken to FIFA organisers today and the Women’s Football World Cup tournament will proceed as planned with the opening match tonight between New Zealand and Norway.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz