- Posted March 23, 2021
Statement regarding the NZSIS Arotake internal review by
NZSIS Director-General Rebecca Kitteridge
22 March 2021
I am pleased to publicly release the NZSIS’s internal review into our processes and decision making in the lead up to the 15 March 2019 terrorist attacks in Christchurch.
I commissioned the review, which we called Arotake, meaning to evaluate or review in te reo Māori, shortly after the Royal Commission of Inquiry was established. I had complete faith that the Royal Commission of Inquiry was going to conduct a full and thorough inquiry but in the interests of national security my organisation needed an earlier indication of whether NZSIS could or should have known about the perpetrator of the attacks. We also needed an external expert to identify steps we could take to improve our ability to identify and disrupt such attacks in the future.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry is the most serious response available to an issue available to the New Zealand Government and investigates issues of great importance and difficulty. A Royal Commission of Inquiry is independent of government and has wide ranging powers to gather evidence and information as it sees necessary in order to fully consider the issues. The Commissioners then make their findings and recommendations.
NZSIS engaged fully with the Royal Commission of Inquiry from the outset, making available all information requested and giving unfettered access to our staff and records. Immediately following its completion, Arotake was delivered to the Royal Commission of Inquiry in full and the Commissioners were able to use it as an input into their deliberations. While Arotake remains useful internally for NZSIS, its findings are superseded by the findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, which the Government has accepted in principle.
Arotake was led by an external and experienced intelligence expert in counterterrorism from one of our Five-Eyes partners. It was completed by June 2019 and included a number of recommendations that were accepted at the time and have already resulted in meaningful changes.
NZSIS has strengthened the way we identify and investigate national security threats and has changed the mechanism through which leads are prioritised and assessed. The reviewer was given unrestricted access to our staff, systems and records. He conducted what was probably the most forensic search ever undertaken of NZSIS’s information repositories to look for any reference whatsoever to the individual responsible for the attacks or anything that could have uncovered his plans. Nothing of national security relevance was found.
I released the Executive Summary of Arotake shortly after the publication of the Royal Commission’s report in December 2020. The idea was to help provide context to the many times Arotake was mentioned in the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s report.
Soon after the Executive Summary was published, I asked my team to start preparing the full report for publication, redacting only the most highly sensitive information. This has allowed us to remove the Top Secret classification and release it as an Unclassified document with as much detail as possible.
The name of the individual responsible is included in the redactions. Members of the Muslim community asked us to remove the individual’s name from the review in line with the approach taken by the Royal Commission in its report. We have applied this request to Arotake retrospectively.
I am pleased this review is now public. It is important for New Zealanders to know that NZSIS sought to learn everything it could from this terrorist attack that has had such a terrible impact on the families of the victims and Muslim New Zealanders, both in Christchurch and around the country. That commitment is as strong today as it was in the days and weeks that followed the awful attacks on 15 March 2019.
Ngā mihi
Rebecca Kitteridge
Director-General of Security, NZSIS
Read the Arotake internal review [PDF, 15 MB].
Read the executive summary of Arotake [PDF, 614 KB].
The name of the terrorist is redacted in these documents.