As he prepared to enter a mosque and open fire, the gunman responsible for the New Zealand massacre was playing a song honouring a war criminal convicted over the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, Al Jazeera reports.
The detail was captured in a video of the gunman driving to the scene of the Christchurch shootings.
The song playing in the gunman’s car was from a propaganda video produced by three Bosnian Serb soldiers and warns Bosnian Muslims that Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic, were coming for them.
Karadzic, a former Serbian politician, was sentenced by the United Nations to 40 years in prison for war crimes, including the killing of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by Serbian forces.
The song has spurred a multitude of parodies and has become an internet meme called ‘Remove Kebab’, a euphemism for ethnically cleansing Muslims, Al Jazeera reports.
The phrase ‘Kebab removed’ was written on the gunman’s rifle.
The suspect was also believed to have been inspired by other historical figures who fought Muslims, Al Jazeera says.
The gunman claimed in a 74-page manifesto published before the attacks that he had been inspired by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 in an attack in Norway in 2011.
Political scientist Jasmin Mujanovic wrote on Twitter that the markings were “steeped in toxic, faux-historical narratives about ‘defending’ white Christendom”.
