New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, rebuked Erdoğan for using footage of the shootings, saying it could endanger New Zealanders abroad. Erdoğan also displayed extracts from a “manifesto” posted online by the suspected attacker and later taken down.
Erdoğan said he would send home “in caskets” anyone attempting such an attack in Turkey, which he claimed was not the work of a lone gunman.
Erdoğan said: “They are testing us from 16,500km away, from New Zealand, with the messages they are giving from there. This isn’t an individual act, this is organised.”
Erdoğan also showed grainy video footage of the shootings, which the gunman had broadcast live on Facebook. He also displayed on giant screens extracts from the so-called manifesto allegedly prepared by the suspect asserting he wanted to drive Turks from Turkey’s north-western, European region. Half of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, spans the eastern side of the Bosphorus, with its European half to the west.
“We have been here for 1,000 years and will be here until the apocalypse, God willing,” Erdogan told an annual rally on Monday commemorating the 1915 Gallipoli campaign during the first world war, when Ottoman soldiers defeated British-led forces including Australian and New Zealand troops trying to seize the peninsula, a gateway to Istanbul.
“You will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople,” he added, referring to the city’s name under its Christian Byzantine rulers before it was conquered by Muslim Ottomans in 1453.
“Your grandparents came here … and they returned in caskets,” he said. “Have no doubt we will send you back like your grandfathers.”
The suspect in the Christchurch shootings is reported to have visited Turkey twice, but the purpose of his visits is not known.
Referring to the gunman’s manifesto, Erdoğan told a rally in Gaziantep: “What does it say? That we shouldn’t go west of the Bosphorus, meaning Europe. Otherwise he would come to Istanbul, kill us all, drive us out of our land.”
New Zealand has been campaigning for Facebook and other social media sites to take down the video of the killing, and its government will be exasperated that a world leader thought it was appropriate to show the footage.
