A NZ link to suicide bombing

Stuff reports:

The man who planned a July attack on one of Islam’s holiest sites was as a former scholarship student in New Zealand who abandoned his studies to join the Islamic State group in Syria.

Taie bin Salem bin Yaslam al-Saya’ari died alongside another extremist in a shootout on Saturday with officers in Riyadh, wearing a suicide bomb vest and clutching a machine gun, Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday (NZT).

It said he manufactured the suicide bomb used in the July 4 attack outside of the Medina mosque where the Prophet Muhammad is buried, an assault which killed four Saudi security force members and wounded five. …

Al-Saya’ari previously was a scholarship student in New Zealand who quit school to travel to Syria and fight in the country’s civil war, the ministry said.

It said he later travelled to Turkey, Sudan and Yemen before returning to the kingdom.

So was he radicalised before he came to NZ or did he become radicalised while studying in NZ?