Man shot dead by police after supermarket 'terrorist attack'
Police have shot and killed a man who entered a supermarket in New Zealand and injured several people, in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as a "terrorist attack".
On Friday afternoon, police responded to an incident at a supermarket in New Lynn, a suburb in southwest Auckland.
In a statement released by police, it was confirmed a man entered the supermarket and injured "multiple people".
"Police have located the man and he has been shot. He has died at the scene," the police said earlier on Friday.
AAP reports there is a video of people fleeing the supermarket and at least one person suffered a stab wound.
Amit Nand was in the Countdown supermarket at the time of the attack.
"People were running up to me saying 'go outside because people are being stabbed'," he told NewsHub.
"I saw him with a knife and then I went past him, I went by him with another guy and I told him to drop the f**king knife."
Mr Nand said he was ready to hit the perpetrator with a knife, but he was told by an undercover cop to step back and he witnessed the police officer shoot the man.
Ms Ardern later confirmed six people were injured in the attack and three were in a critical condition.
Michelle Miller told RNZ the incident was 'horrific" and that she was "pretty shaken up", saying she saw a man "running around with a knife", though she didn't see anyone get injured.
Another witness, only identified as Tim, told RNZ he was just about to head into LynnMall when he heard screaming and saw people rushing out of the Countdown entrance.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster told the media on Friday evening it is understood all those who were injured in the incident were members of the public.
Tim said he overheard someone say "he stabbed, he stabbed".
Police acted in a matter of seconds, after the man obtained a knife in the store.
"The individual was under constant monitoring, and it was the police surveillance team and Special Tactics group, who were part of that monitoring and surveillance that shot and killed him. Within I'm told the space of roughly 60 seconds of the attack starting," Ms Ardern said.
"A violent extremist" known to police
Ms Ardern addressed the media following the incident and described the man as a "violent extremist".
"It [the attack] was senseless, and I'm so sorry it happened," she said, while acknowledging the six people who were injured in the attack.
The man was known to police and he was under "heavy surveillance" at the time of the attack.
He was a Sri Lankan national and was known to police since 2016, after arriving in New Zealand in 2011.
"What happened today was despicable," Ms Ardern said.
"It was hateful it was wrong, it was carried out by an individual, not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity, but an individual person who was gripped by ideology that is not supported here."
She said the man's ideology was "ISIS inspired" and authorities are confident he acted alone.
She said that by law, the man was not allowed to be kept in prison and the Prime Minister was unable to shared many details around the man's circumstances due to court-issued suppression orders.
"I can tell you that agencies were using every single possible means available to them to protect the New Zealand public from this individual. Every single possible means," she said.
More to come.
With AAP
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