‘RUN!’: New Zealand mosque shooting victims recount horror, mourn the lost

Amin and his father, Muhammad Amin Nasir, were just 200 metres from the Al Noor mosque on Friday when everything went wrong. They had no idea that a white supremacist had just slaughtered at least 41 people inside the mosque.

People move the flowers after police removed a police line, outside Masjid Al Noor in Christchurch, New Zealand. REUTERS

They had walked that once innocuous stretch of sidewalk side-by-side so many times. Every Friday, Yasir Amin and his dad had ambled along the path toward the mosque where they prayed together in peace, a routine so serene and so ordinary that Amin was nearly blinded by confusion when the man drove up with the gun.

Amin and his father, Muhammad Amin Nasir, were just 200 metres from the Al Noor mosque on Friday when everything went wrong. They had no idea that a white supremacist had just slaughtered at least 41 people inside the mosque’s hallowed halls, or that more people would be killed at a second mosque soon after.

All they knew was that a car that had been driving by had suddenly stopped. And a man was leaning out the car’s window, pointing a gun at them.