make some sort of contact," he said.

The groups, which emerged in the late 1960s, have evolved over time, coalescing for years around fear of New Zealand moving too far from its British roots, anti-Semitism and opposition to Maori sovereignty and Asian immigrants, and then shifting to Islamophobia following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.

Spoonley, who researched extreme-right groups in the U.K. in the 1970s, said when he returned to New Zealand in the 1980s he was told by authorities there were no similar organizations.

But he quickly found more than 70 extreme-right groups, many of them in Christchurch. He attributes three murders in New Zealand since 1989 to white supremacists, including two that were ideologically motivated — a South Korean tourist in 2003 and a homeless gaydecided to go whole hog, 80-85 percent of resources into detecting jihadists," he said. "The rest was devoted to Marxists, environmentalists, animal rights activists. They went for the left."

One such jihadi from New Zealand, along with an Australian, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in November 2013 while fighting for al-Qaida.

There was no political advantage in targeting alienated young white men seen by the wider population as mostly harmless "Pakeha losers," a Maori word for white New Zealanders, Buchanan said.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said the government will convene an inquiry into the intelligence and security services, seeking to understand why Tarrant was able to escape detection.

Tarrant, according to Buchanan, may have been part of a small cell.

"There could be tacit enablers," he said.

"He was