One of two people who were shot in downtown Auckland on Thursday night has died in hospital, police have confirmed.
Police were called after receiving reports of a fight between a group of people at about 11.30pm on Thursday on lower Queen Street, in Auckland’s city centre.
RNZ reported that fighting broke out within the group before one person pulled out a firearm and fired several times. One victim was shot in the head and the other in the abdomen. Both were taken to Auckland hospital in a critical condition.
Police confirmed on Friday evening that one of the victims had now died. The other victim was in a stable condition.
Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Bolton said the man who died was taken off life support and “sadly succumbed to his injuries with family beside him”.
He said it was a tragic outcome, and that the focus of police remained on locating the person responsible.
“The formal process around a post-mortem and formal identification will take place, and police will look to release further information about the man once we are in a position to do so,” Bolton said.
In a press conference earlier in the day, Bolton said the two people shot in the CBD late “weren’t looking for trouble”.
The shooting is the second such incident in Auckland in less than a month, and occurred not far from a fatal shooting in July, where a man shot dead two men and injured six others at a building site on Queen Street. The gunman died at the scene.
Gun violence remains rare in New Zealand, which tightened its firearm laws after a man killed 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch in 2019, the country’s worst peacetime mass shooting. The government banned all military-style semi-automatics and similar weapons the same year.
