London: Ukraine’s secret service has discovered guns, explosives and ammunition at the headquarters of what it says is a neo-Nazi cell whose members were followers of the Australian man who carried out the Christchurch mosque terrorist attacks last year.
SBU officials raided two premises in the capital Kiev and in Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city — following a report about the group published last year by the investigative website Bellingcat.
That report examined Russian and Ukrainian language versions of Brenton Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto which were being printed and distributed as well as shared online.
Bellingcat reporter Christo Grozev said that a message posted on a Telegram group hosted by the cell made veiled threats of an attack as retaliation for the raid carried out on Wednesday morning, Ukraine time.
Tarrant’s manifesto, which he published online shortly before carrying out his attacks, is banned in New Zealand. But Kiwi law cannot prevent the spread of the document elsewhere, including in Eastern European and Balkan countries where Tarrant travelled and met fellow far-right extremists.
Bellingcat links the spread of the document outside the English-speaking world to neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend.
While it’s “not clear who may have actually translated the manifesto and whether it was an individual(s) associated with Wotanjugend, it’s clear that the Kiev-based, Russia-rooted neo-Nazi group has been at the forefront of promoting it online,” Bellingcat reported.
There is no evidence of Tarrant having visited Ukraine where he is said to have inspired the neo-Nazi cell. Tarrant had travelled to Russia, according to a letter he wrote from prison.
Read the article by Latika Bourke in The Brisbane Times.