Special Investigation Group
The National Security Investigations Team (NSIT), known as the Special Investigation Group (SIG) prior to 2016, is a New Zealand government group that focuses on threats to national security, formed in response to the September 11 attacks. It is part of the New Zealand Police, with four NSIT teams in regional centres around the country. History As the Special Investigation Group Funding for the group was announced in 2004 and the group was formed in 2005. The formation of a central Strategic Intelligence Unit was approved by the New Zealand government as early as January 2002. The group was formed 'to focus on terrorism threats to national security' in response to September 11 terrorist attacks. SIG appears to be operated by New Zealand police in connection with the New Zealand Defence Force, Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The group reportedly has teams in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. An intelligence unit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering . New Zealand is about east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and then developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the United Kingdom and Māori chiefs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Christchurch Mosque Shootings
On 15 March 2019, two consecutive mass shootings occurred in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacks, carried out by a lone gunman who entered both mosques during Friday prayer, began at the Al Noor Mosque in the suburb of Riccarton at 1:40 pm and continued at the Linwood Islamic Centre at 1:52 pm. 51 people were killed and 40 were injured. The gunman, 28-year-old Brenton Harrison Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, was arrested after his vehicle was rammed by a police unit as he was driving to a third mosque in Ashburton. He was described in media reports as a white supremacist. He had live-streamed the first shooting on Facebook, and prior to the attack, had published an online manifesto; both the video and manifesto were subsequently banned in New Zealand and Australia. On 26 March 2020, he pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders, and engaging in a terrorist act, and in August was sentenced to life ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sir John Key
Sir John Phillip Key (born 9 August 1961) is a New Zealand retired politician who served as the 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2008 to 2016 and as Leader of the New Zealand National Party from 2006 to 2016. After resigning from both posts in December 2016 and leaving politics, Key was appointed to the board of directors and role of chairman in several New Zealand corporations. Born in Auckland before moving to Christchurch when he was a child, Key attended the University of Canterbury and graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Commerce. He began a career in the foreign exchange market in New Zealand before moving overseas to work for Merrill Lynch, in which he became head of global foreign exchange in 1995, a position he would hold for six years. In 1999 he was appointed a member of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York until leaving in 2001. Key entered the New Zealand Parliament representing the Auckland electorate of Helensvil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Zealand Herald
''The New Zealand Herald'' is a daily newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand, owned by New Zealand Media and Entertainment, and considered a newspaper of record for New Zealand. It has the largest newspaper circulation of all newspapers in New Zealand, peaking at over 200,000 copies in 2006, although circulation of the daily ''Herald'' had declined to 100,073 copies on average by September 2019. Its main circulation area is the Auckland region. It is also delivered to much of the upper North Island including Northland, Waikato and King Country. History ''The New Zealand Herald'' was founded by William Chisholm Wilson, and first published on 13 November 1863. Wilson had been a partner with John Williamson in the ''New Zealander'', but left to start a rival daily newspaper as he saw a business opportunity with Auckland's rapidly growing population. He had also split with Williamson because Wilson supported the war against the Māori (which the ''Herald'' termed "the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Harmeet Singh Sooden
Harmeet Singh Sooden (born 1973) is a Canadian-New Zealand anti-war activist who volunteered for the international NGO Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq. He was held captive in Baghdad with three others for almost four months until being freed by multi-national forces on 23 March 2006. Sooden was born and raised in Zambia. His parents are Sikhs from Kashmir. His great-grandfather fought for the British Indian Army in World War I and died in Basra in 1916 during the Mesopotamian Campaign. As an inspiration for peace work, he cites his grandfather who was a career soldier in the British Indian Army and then the Indian Army. He says he was also motivated by the experiences of a friend who survived the World Trade Center attack on 11 September 2001, and the ordeal of Maher Arar, a university classmate who was subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture. Sooden holds degrees in Computer Engineering from McGill University in Montréal, Canada and English literature from ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mosque
A mosque (; from ar, مَسْجِد, masjid, ; literally "place of ritual prostration"), also called masjid, is a place of prayer for Muslims. Mosques are usually covered buildings, but can be any place where prayers ( sujud) are performed, including outdoor courtyards. The first mosques were simple places of prayer for Muslims, and may have been open spaces rather than buildings. In the first stage of Islamic architecture, 650-750 CE, early mosques comprised open and closed covered spaces enclosed by walls, often with minarets from which calls to prayer were issued. Mosque buildings typically contain an ornamental niche ('' mihrab'') set into the wall that indicates the direction of Mecca (''qiblah''), Wudu, ablution facilities. The pulpit (''minbar''), from which the Friday (jumu'ah) sermon (''khutba'') is delivered, was in earlier times characteristic of the central city mosque, but has since become common in smaller mosques. Mosques typically have Islam and gender se ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Islamic Terrorism
Islamic terrorism (also known as Islamist terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism) refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists. Incidents and fatalities from Islamic terrorism have been concentrated in eight Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria), while four Islamic extremist groups (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of all deaths from terrorism in 2015. The annual number of fatalities from terrorist attacks grew sharply from 2011 to 2014 when it reached a peak of 33,438, before declining to 13,826 in 2019. Since at least the 1990s, these terrorist incidents have occurred on a global scale, affecting not only Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia, but also Russia, Australia, Canada, Israel, India, the United States, China, Philippines, Thailand and countries within Europe. Su ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Right-wing Terrorism
Right-wing terrorism, hard right terrorism, extreme right terrorism or far-right terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by a variety of different right-wing and far-right ideologies, most prominently, it is motivated by neo-Nazism, anti-communism, neo-fascism, ecofascism, ethnonationalism, religious nationalism, and anti-government patriot/sovereign citizen beliefs, and occasionally, it is motivated by opposition to abortion, tax resistance, and homophobia. Modern right-wing terrorism largely emerged in Western Europe in the 1970s, and after the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it emerged in Eastern Europe and Russia. Right-wing terrorists aim to overthrow governments and replace them with nationalist and/or fascist regimes. They believe that their actions will trigger events that will ultimately lead to the establishment of these authoritarian governments. Although they frequently take inspiration from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Government Communications Security Bureau
The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) ( mi, Te Tira Tiaki) is the public-service department of New Zealand charged with promoting New Zealand's national security by collecting and analysing information of an intelligence nature. The GCSB is considered to be New Zealand’s most powerful intelligence agency, and has been alleged to have conducted more espionage and data collection than the country’s primary intelligence agency, the less funded NZSIS. This has at times proven controversial, although the GCSB does not have the baggage of criticism attached to it for a perceived failure to be effective like the NZSIS does. The GCSB is considered an equivalent of GCHQ in the United Kingdom or the NSA in the United States. According to the Bureau's official website, it has a mission of contributing to the national security of New Zealand by providing information assurance and cybersecurity, foreign intelligence, and assistance to other New Zealand government agenci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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September 11 Attacks
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the Northeastern United States to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and the third plane into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States military) in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane was intended to hit a federal government building in Washington, D.C., but crashed in a field following a passenger revolt. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and instigated the war on terror. The first impact was that of American Airlines Flight 11. It was crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan at 8:46 a.m. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03, the World Trade Cen ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Zealand Security Intelligence Service
The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS or SIS; mi, Te Pā Whakamarumaru) is New Zealand's primary national intelligence agency. It is responsible for providing information and advising on matters including national security (including counterterrorism and counterintelligence) and foreign intelligence. It is headquartered in Wellington and overseen by a Director-General, the Minister of New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee; independent oversight is provided by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. SIS was established on 28 November 1956 with the primary function of combating perceived increases in Soviet intelligence operations in Australia and New Zealand. Since then, its legislated powers have expanded to increase its monitoring capabilities and include entry into private property. Its role has also expanded to include countering domestic and international terrorism, chemical, biolog ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Zealand Defence Force
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF; mi, Te Ope Kātua o Aotearoa, "Line of Defence of New Zealand") are the armed forces of New Zealand. The NZDF is responsible for the protection of the national security of New Zealand and her realm, promoting its interests, safeguarding peace and security, as well as supporting peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. It consists of three services: the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN), the New Zealand Army and the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF), as well as 'tri-service' components. The NZDF has a strength of 15,191 made up of 9,215 regular force personnel, 3,030 reserve force personnel and 2,946 civilian members. It is supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Defence (MOD) and is commanded by the Chief of Defence Force (CDF). The principal roles and tasks expected of the NZDF is to provide a combat capable force to defend New Zealand’s sovereign territory, and protect critical lines of communication. To provide civil defence supp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |