The team leader of the armed offenders squad (AOS) during the Christchurch mosque attacks told the inquest on Tuesday he was so frustrated by the delay in ambulances getting to Al Noor Mosque that he asked if he needed to walk down to St John himself to hurry things up.
Just two minutes after the terrorist fled Al Noor Mosque, there was the voice of 'Zero Alpha' saying "I've got a four-man contact team probably two minutes out".
He was talking on the main police radio channel 1.
"Four-man AOS contact teams are just about to leave the station, ah, going be backed up by another four-man, about, ah, three minutes after that, copy," he said.
'Zero Alpha' is the AOS duty supervisor. On March 15, 2019, he controlled the armed police response.
After hearing news of the shooting, he immediately relocated to the AOS squad room at the Justice Precinct.
He recalls ongoing requests from the ground for ambulances.
"I remember saying to someone in the comms room something like, 'ah, do I have to physically go down and talk to them myself'," he said.
"I was hearing the absolute despair from the tact operators on the ground that they weren't getting assistance, that’s where my frustration was from."
There is no record of the AOS tactical radio channel from March 15. The on-call reserve member was tasked with inserting a cassette tape into a recording device in the wagon and turning it on but that day, the batteries were flat.
He remembers one AOS member mentioning the number of dead at Al Noor.
"I queried numbers with him as I thought he had said three and four, and I asked him to confirm three and four, and he responded no, 30, three-zero and 40, four-zero," he said.
The man has performed the role of Zero Alpha with active offenders hundreds of times but said he has never experienced an event like this in his career - no one had.
