Abdul Aziz hailed a hero for using a credit card scanning machine and the gunman’s spent weapon as he confronted the attacker

A worshipper at the site of the second Christchurch mosque attack has spoken of how he chased away the gunman armed only with a credit card machine.

Abdul Aziz, who was born in Afghanistan but is an Australian citizen and lived in Sydney for 27 years, was inside the Linwood mosque with four of his children for Friday prayers when someone shouted that a gunman had opened fire.

“He had on army clothes,” Aziz told Reuters on Sunday. “I wasn’t sure if he was the good guy or the bad guy. When he swore at me, I knew that he’s not the good guy.”

When he realised the mosque was being attacked, the 48-year-old ran towards the gunman, picking up a credit card machine as a makeshift weapon. After the gunman had run back to his car to get another gun, Aziz said he threw the credit card machine, ducking between the cars to avoid gunfire.

He then picked up a gun dropped by the attacker and pulled the trigger, but it was empty. “I was screaming at the guy, ‘come over here, come over here’ – I just wanted to put his focus on me,” Aziz said.

Aziz said the gunman went inside the mosque, and he followed, eventually confronting him again.

“When he saw me with the shotgun in my hands, he dropped the gun and ran away toward his car. I chased him,” he said. “He sat in his car and with the shotgun in my hands, I threw it through his window like an arrow. He just swore at me and took off.”

Aziz has been called a hero by the mosque’s acting imam, Latef Alabi, who said he believed the death toll would have been far higher if it had not been for Aziz’s actions.

Alabi said he stopped prayer when he looked out of the window and spotted a man in black military-style gear and a helmet holding a large gun, mistaking him for a police officer. Then he saw two bodies and “realised this is something else”.

Alabi told his congregation of about 80 to get down. “Then this brother [Aziz] came over. He went after him, and he managed to overpower him, and that’s how we were saved,” Alabi told Associated Press. “Otherwise, if he managed to come into the mosque, then we would all probably be gone.”

Aziz is from Kabul, Afghanistan, but left the war-torn country several years ago. He has been in Christchurch for two and a half years and owns a furniture shop.

“When I came back in the mosque, I could see that everybody was very frightened and trying to cover,” he said. “I told them, ‘Brother, you are safe now, get up, he’s gone. He’s just run away.’ And then after that everybody started crying.”

After Aziz confronted him, the gunman was chased down by two police officers who blocked his car and captured him. “Those two police officers acted with absolute courage,” police commissioner Mike Bush said at a news conference on Sunday. “They have prevented further deaths and risked their own lives to do so.”

More heroes have come to light as investigators pieced together the incident.

Naeem Rashid, 50, was seen lunging at the gunman in the livestream video from the initial attack on Al Noor mosque. Rashid, from Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a New Zealand resident for nine years, was in the mosque with his 21-year-old son. Both were killed.

Reuters contributed to this report

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