In the case of the knife attack in Auckland, New Zealand authorities have apparently been trying for years to deport the Sri Lankan perpetrator.
As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Saturday, it was "frustrating" that the man who was shot in the act, a known threat to the police, was allowed to roam free.
According to information that has only now been released, the Islamist had already received a deportation notice in April 2019.
But while his appeal process dragged on, the 32-year-old grabbed a kitchen knife from a display case in a supermarket in the suburbs of Auckland on Friday and began to attack people at random.
Seven were injured, three of them seriously.
Undercover officers assigned to monitor the man shot him dead shortly afterwards.
Obtained refugee status through fraud
The man came to New Zealand in 2011 on a student visa.
Two years later he was granted refugee status.
In 2016, the police noticed him because he had expressed sympathy for terrorist attacks on Facebook.
As Ardern now described, it turned out during the investigation that the man had obtained refugee status through fraud. The authorities initiated proceedings to withdraw the man's protection status. The following year, he was arrested at Auckland Airport on suspicion that he was traveling to civil war Syria. A large hunting knife and Islamist propaganda material were found during a search of his home, according to court documents.
In 2019, the man, who described himself as a Tamil Muslim, appealed against the threat of deportation.
In court, he said he would face "arrest, detention, ill-treatment and torture" if he were sent back to Sri Lanka.
At the time, the man was still in pre-trial detention for criminal proceedings, from which he was released after three years.
As Ardern further described, the authorities were aware of the danger posed by the Islamist.
However, there would have been no legal basis for further imprisonment, neither under the immigration law nor under the anti-terror laws.
Ardern now wants to change the latter before the end of the month.
New Zealand police chief Andrew Coster announced further details about the attack on Saturday.
Accordingly, the man's shadowers had the impression that the Islamist only wanted to buy groceries in the supermarket.
Since he showed a "high level of paranoia", the guards kept their distance from the suspect.
Therefore, according to Coster, it took two minutes for the police to reach and shoot the man after he started to stab himself.
Meanwhile, the perpetrator's mother told a television station in Sri Lanka that her son had been "brainwashed" by neighbors from Syria and Iraq.
"We knew that he had changed," she said in her house in Kattankudy, east of the capital Colombo.