Tarrant wrote that while traveling through France, Portugal and Spain he was horrified by the killing of Ebba Åkerlund, an 11-year-old girl, when an Uzbek man, Rakhmat Akilov, rammed his truck into a group of pedestrians in Stockholm in April 2017. Two of the rifles used in the Christchurch shooting had references to Åkerlund scrawled on them, among other messages.