CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Azaam Afaan did not want to be late. The first funeral since Friday’s terrorist attack was about to begin, and although he had no idea who was being buried, he just knew he needed to participate.
Staring through dark sunglasses at the cemetery’s fringe — fighting back tears for a slain friend, as hundreds of mourners approached a hilltop of dirt cut open with row after row of graves — he said he wanted to be part of someone’s goodbye.
“It’s like you’re short of breath,’’ he said, explaining what it has been like to wait so long for the burials to begin after a gunman killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch. “Now we can breathe freely. They’re going to the place they’re supposed to be.’’
Islam’s rituals of death prioritize immediate burial and a joyful departure.
But as the first six victims were laid to rest Wednesday in a city where flowers and police tape still fill intersections, the opportunities for relief continued to be elusive, drawing out sorrow, allowing time for relatives to arrive from abroad, and delivering closure in spare droplets.
The process of identifying bodies has been, by all accounts, meticulous, in line with international standards and New Zealand’s strict procedures for murder victims. It has also been divisive.
Families and some officials spoke of rifts emerging as coroners work overtime to identify the victims while many wonder what is taking so long to bury the dead.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who announced Wednesday that the government will ban “military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles,’’ told reporters that she shared the families’ frustration.
“I know the process has been incredibly difficult and frustratingly slow,’’ she said.
Some of the affected families described the process as paternalistic.
“We’ve been doing this for 1,400 years — we don’t need instructions,’’ Saad Nasser, 57, said as he departed the day’s first funeral, for Khalid Mustafa, 44, and his son, Hamza Mustafa, 16.
The Mustafas were refugees who had moved to New Zealand only a few months ago after escaping the civil war in Syria.
Hamza’s 13-year-old brother, Zaid, watched from a wheelchair, his leg bandaged from where he had been shot, as the bodies wrapped in white shawls and in open caskets were lowered into the ground.
‘‘I don’t want to be here alone,’’ Zaid said, according to one attendee at the funeral.
Hamza called his mother Salwa after the attacks began. He was running with his brother, who had already been shot, when his mother heard more shooting and screaming and then nothing.
After the attack was over, someone picked up the phone, the line still open, and told Salwa her son was dead.
Zaid, his mother, and his 10-year-old sister are now left without the two oldest men of the family.
The family had been living in Jordan and had hoped to join members of the ethnic Circassian community in the United States but were thwarted by President Trump’s restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, according to local reports.
Hamza was a talented horse rider and loved to play soccer and go fishing, his classmates at Cashmere High School remembered.
Ardern, the prime minister, on Wednesday visited the school, which lost another student and a former student in the shootings.
One student raised her hand with a question that no one had yet asked the prime minister in public.
“How are you?’’ she asked.
“Thank you for asking,’’ Ardern said. “I’m very sad.’’
The last of the six funerals Wednesday was for a man the police had identified but whose name they did not release.
He was the first one killed — the victim linked to the one murder charge currently laid against the suspected white nationalist gunman.
Material from the Washington Post was used in this report.
