The suspect in the murder of almost 50 people at mosques in New Zealand on Friday cited the killing of an 11-year-old Swedish girl as a motivator behind the massacres.
Ebba Akerlund was killed in a 2017 terror attack in Sweden. Akerlund, who was partially deaf, was crushed by a truck when Uzbek asylum seeker Rakhmat Akilov drove the vehicle through a crowd in Stockholm.
Her death has been frequently used on the dark web in white-supremacist and anti-immigrant discussions, according to the Daily Beast.
The suspect said there was something different about the Stockholm attack, mentioning Akerlund a handful of times in the 74-page manifesto.
“That difference was Ebba Akerlund. Young, innocent and dead Ebba,” the document said. “Ebba death at the hands of the invaders, the indignity of her violent demise and my inability to stop it broke through my own jaded cynicism like a sledgehammer.”
“I take revenge for Ebba Akerlund,” the document said under a section titled “Why did you carry out the attack?”
In response to reports that Akerlund’s name had been inscribed on the shooter’s assault rifle, her father, Stefan, told a Swedish newspaper that he was mortified.
“I broke into a cold sweat as soon as I saw that he had rifles with my daughter’s name,” he said. “How in hell can we ever get to mourn in peace?”
