Travels and racist views Tarrant began expressing racist ideas from a young age.[34] From 2012 onward, he visited a number of countries in Asia and Europe, using the money he inherited from his father. He always travelled alone, with the exception of a trip to North Korea. Police in Bulgaria and Turkey investigated Tarrant's visits to their countries.[34][71][78][79] Security officials suspected that he had come into contact with far-right organisations about two years before the shooting, while visiting European nations.[80] He donated €1,500 to Identitäre Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ, the Austrian branch of Generation Identity (part of the Identitarian movement) in Europe, as well as €2,200 to Génération Identitaire, the French branch of the group, and interacted with IBÖ leader Martin Sellner via email between January 2018 and July 2018, offering to meet in Vienna and a linking to his YouTubechannel.[81]
Captivated with sites of battles between Christian European nations and the Ottoman Empire, Tarrant went on another series of visits to the Balkans from 2016 to 2018, with Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey, and Bosnia-Herzegovina confirming his presence there in these years.[82] He posted Balkan nationalist material on social media platforms[83] and called for the United States to be weakened in order to prevent events such as the NATO intervention in Kosovo in support of Muslim Albanians against Christian Serbs.[50][82][84]He said he was against intervention by NATO because he saw the Serbian military as "Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe".[50][84]By June 2016, relatives noted a change in Tarrant's personality, which he claimed was the result of a mugging incident in Ethiopia, and his mother had expressed concern for his mental health.[34]
In 2016, three years prior to the attacks, Tarrant praised Blair Cottrell as a leader of the far-right movements in Australia and made more than 30 comments on the now-deleted "United Patriots Front" and "True Blue Crew" webpages. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation team who studied the comments called them "fragments and digital impressions of a well-travelled young man who frequented hate-filled anonymous messaging boards and was deeply engaged in a global alt-right culture."[85] A Melbourne man said that in 2016, he filed a police complaint after Tarrant allegedly told him in an online conversation, "I hope one day you meet the rope". He said that the police told him to block Tarrant and did not take a statement from him. The police said that they were unable to locate a complaint.[86]
After his arrest, Tarrant told investigators that he frequented right-wing discussion boards on 4chan and 8chan and also found YouTube to be "a significant source of information and inspiration."[34]
, the Austrian branch of Generation Identity (part of the Identitarian movement) in Europe, as well as €2,200 to Génération Identitaire, the French branch of the group, and interacted with IBÖ leader Martin Sellner via email between January 2018 and July 2018, offering to meet in Vienna and a linking to his YouTubechannel.[81]
