The Pakistani Man Who Tried to Stop the New Zealand Shooter Will Be Honored With a Posthumous Award

“Even in his last moments, he did what he could to help others.”

A vigil for the Christchurch victims in Lahore, Pakistan. K.M. Chaudary/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A Pakistani man who tried to stop the shooter during a massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, will be honored with a posthumous national award, Pakistan’s prime minister announced on Sunday. Naeem Rashid, 50, tried to tackle the gunman outside of one of the two mosques before being shot and killed along with his 21-year-old son, Talha. 

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted on Sunday that Rashid was “martyred trying to tackle the White Supremacist terrorist,” and that his courage would be recognized with a national award. He also declared Monday a national day of mourning. “I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim,” he tweeted on Friday, soon after the attack.

Rashid was a teacher who moved to New Zealand almost a decade ago, and had been in the midst of planning his son’s wedding. “We were talking to Naeem about the family coming to Pakistan for Talha’s wedding,” Khurshid Alam, Rashid’s brother, told the Washington Post. “Now we are talking about his death and funeral arrangements.” 

“I still can’t understand or believe why and how this happened,” Ambreen Rashid, Naeem’s wife, told the Khaleej Times, a newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates. “But, I know that my husband is a hero. He always helped people and even in his last moments, he did what he could to help others.”

Seven other Pakistanis were killed at the shooting, which claimed the lives of at least 50 people. The suspect, a 28-year-old Australian man named Brenton Harrison Tarrant, has been taken into custody and charged with murder. 

While New Zealand police have yet to release a detailed account of the incident, other stories of bravery have emerged: At the Linwood Mosque, Abdul Aziz, 48, immediately tried to confront the shooter, throwing a credit card machine at him and later a discarded shotgun at the man’s car before he drove away. “It was like my mind wasn’t working,” Aziz, who emigrated from Afghanistan, told the New York Times. “It was automatic reaction, like anybody. I was prepared to give my life to save another life.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate