10 years to MELTDOWN

• Published date: 12 September 2021
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

He played football at Te Henga, hiked the Waitākere Ranges, camped and played games at Motutapu Island.

He made jokes. Most were funny but some so bad they revealed both his desire to connect and his desperate inability to do so.

Sometimes, he tested out what he had learned online about Islamic State and other young men who knelt in prayer with him at an Auckland mosque drew sharply back, saying, brother, this is not Islam.

That was in late 2015 and early 2016, about four years after Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen arrived in New Zealand with a student visa and a fractured mind. It’s the mid-point between his arrival and police racing to halt a frenzied attack that had already injured seven people.

It’s a snapshot of a time when Samsudeen was teetering on the edge, seemingly grasping for purchase while sliding towards the ugly violence that left him shot dead on a supermarket floor in Auckland’s New Lynn.

He came here in 2011 physically scarred and psychologically damaged. It was a journey that began with an application for a student visa in July that year but, by his account, his feet were set on a path to somewhere, anywhere, years earlier.

Samsudeen was once a Sri Lankan boy whose father was a school principal and whose mother stayed home to raise their four children while running a small business.

They lived on the eastern coast of the island, where it’s hot all year round with long white beaches and palm trees. His parents were involved and respected citizens in their city, and it was this which made his father important to Tamil militant Colonel Karuna Amman.

This is the story Samsudeen told Immigration NZ and later the Immigration and Protection Tribunal, which described his story as “superficially unsatisfactory” but credible.

Where Karuna went, there were massacres. The 26-year Sri Lankan civil war with Tamil separatists — and Samsudeen was a Tamil Muslim — was bloody, with as many as 100,000 deaths.

Karuna held a senior military role with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and it was this that brought him into Samsudeen’s life even before he was born. When Samsudeen sought refugee status, he told how his father refused to allow Karuna to hide weapons at his school. It was apparently a refusal that led to the family suffering a lifetime of violent harassment, even after Karuna laid down arms to join Sri Lanka’s ruling party, rising to become a minister in government.

The harassment began with grenades through the windows of the family home and persisted for decades. Samsudeen talked of the last of those incidents in which he claimed he was kidnapped with his father, held for days and tortured.

“He was stripped and photographed in front of his father,” the Immigration and Protection Tribunal recounted his testimony. “He was cut, burnt with cigarettes and beaten unconscious.”

Samsudeen told of going into hiding, of men hunting for him and his family’s decision he must leave Sri Lanka. At that point, he was the last of his siblings to leave the country.

His application for a student visa was lodged in July 2011 and approved in September 2011 after a National Security check raised no concerns. He arrived a month later, knowing no one, and almost instantly sought refugee status, was declined, then appealed.

Psychologist Amanda McFadden met with him for six hours to assess his mental health. She described him as a “highly distressed and damaged young man”. He was diagnosed as suffering from PTSD and there was “strong evidence” he was experiencing, over and again, previous traumatic events.

His case to the Tribunal was that if he were returned to Sri Lanka, he would be in serious danger. He had tried running and hiding inside the country with limited success. It always ended in pain and terror. In December 2013, the Tribunal accepted his story.

In January 2014, living in central Auckland, Samsudeen applied for permanent residency, prompting fresh police checks. The NZ Security Intelligence Service carried out a second background check and again no issues were raised. In April 2014, residency was approved.

Lonely, sick and slipping awayIn the years to come, volumes of paperwork would be built on Samsudeen’s short time in New Zealand. Most of it would focus on those years beyond his residency, on that point where he was slipping away from everyone around him.

And there were few who were around him. Those volumes of evidence described a young man, unsettled and mentally unwell, who was isolated and lonely after arriving in a country where he knew no one.

There are those who came to know him through worship at an Auckland mosque...