Wellington, (DPA) A New Zealand police anti-terrorist squad launched a series of raids Monday throughout the country on members of an armed paramilitary group, making several arrests including a militant Maori activist.
Police commissioner Howard Broad told a news conference that the group had set up camps and was training participants to use firearms and other weapons for “military-style activity”.
News reports said that more than a dozen suspects had been arrested, including Tame Iti, a radical from the Tuhoe tribe, who has campaigned for independence for New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people.
The police chief said there was no evidence of any foreign connections. The group reportedly had been under police surveillance for more than a year but was previously unknown to the general public.
The Fairfax Media website said that campaigners from various Maori sovereignty, environmental and so-called peace groups were implicated.
The New Zealand Herald website quoted an unnamed source as saying that the group called itself the Freedom Fighters and had been training in the remote Urewera mountain range, traditional home of the Tuhoe people, who are known as “children of the mist”.
Broad said that the camps were based in that area, but a coordinated police action also raided premises in the capital, Wellington, and the country’s three other main cities of Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch.
He said that the number of people involved in the paramilitary training camps “have numbered in the tens, and those individuals have been of varying ethnicity.”
Reports said that Prime Minister Helen Clark had been kept informed of the operation.