Noraini Abbas Milne woke up her son, Sayyad, by tickling his feet, as was his usual request, and gave him a cuddle. It was 15 March 2019.

She told him that she had booked his travel to a sports tournament in Wellington that he was desperate to attend, and promised she would wait so that they could eat dinner together that night.

Another family would pick up her son from school to drive to the mosque for prayers and she would travel there separately; it was the last time she would see her son alive.

This week Milne wore a yellow scarf to court to watch as the terrorist who murdered her son was sentenced to a term of life in prison without the chance of parole. Yellow had been Sayyad’s favourite colour; butter chicken his favourite food. He was 14.

The Australian man who had slain Sayyad Ahmad Milne and 50 others in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand will never walk free from jail. Brenton Tarrant, 29, who did not oppose his sentence or say anything in court to explain the 15 March 2019 massacre, was the first person in New Zealand, under current laws, to receive such a sentence.

“He, the coward, is already dead to me,” Milne told the Guardian. “I came here to be with my brothers and sisters.” Milne added that in the courtroom: “Sayyad is with me.”

The gunman’s sentencing drew to a close, of a sort, an episode termed the darkest in New Zealand’s history; the country’s worst peacetime massacre. It provoked an unprecedented national and international outpouring of unity and solidarity with the country’s Muslims and prompted calls for a reckoning with what some said were buried roots of racism and white supremacy in New Zealand.

The sentencing this week – which included three days of heartbreaking, and at times angry, statements from Tarrant’s victims – generated a mood of catharsis and jubilation for many.

But it also left many unanswered questions about how the gunman was able to plan and execute the attacks, some in the Muslim community say. They also wonder whether help and support for those bereaved in the attacks, as well as 40 bullet-injured survivors, will now begin to wane.

“I would say that every person in the area providing support in the government needs to read the victim impact statements and ask themselves, ‘Have they done enough? And has the government done enough?’” said Aliya Danzeisen, a spokesperson for the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, who attended the sentencing to support her friends. She added that some victims were still unable to work 18 months on from the terrorist attack, and had struggled to get costs and counselling approved by government agencies.

“When people have told me that the families are doing really well … Yes, they are doing very well for what happened, but there is a lot more that needs to be done,” she said.

Tarrant abruptly pleaded guilty to his crimes in March, reversing an earlier not guilty plea that would have led to a lengthy trial – a prospect many in the community dreaded. But it had also left questions in the minds of many: how had the gunman, as prosecutors had told the court this week, been able to systemically plan and execute such a devastating attack?

“If you take the fact he modified the guns, how and when?” said Danzeisen. “When he got plans of our mosques, how and when? Did he apply to the councils to get them?”

‘I miss his smell’

Two days before the sentence was pronounced, when Noraini Abbas Milne got up to speak in court, she had scribbled out the gunman’s name on the official paperwork bearing her pre-prepared statement so that it did not appear on the same page as her son’s.

Sayyad had died in the same building at Al Noor mosque where his mother hid during the shooting, which came during Friday Prayers; her elder son, who was usually there, had gone on a school trip.

“My survival comes as a great blessing and when I reflect on that day, I have decided I will live my life doing great things for our people, our community,” Milne told the gunman on Tuesday. “There have been many more blessings from your crime.”

She did not tell the killer anything about her son.

Sayyad Milne was mad about football and wanted to play internationally when he grew up (his mother had insisted on a plan B, which was to become an architect). A shy boy who still asked for “cuddles” from his parents, he had excelled at sports and maths.

“I miss his smell,” Milne told the Guardian. “As a mother and child, the smells of someone, your own child … He would purposely come back from any kind of sports and just want to cuddle me because he wants me to smell him.”

His friends have renamed their football team “Milne FC”.

“You are already dead to me,” his mother told the gunman. “Whatever punishment you will receive in this world will never be enough.”

‘Good afternoon to everyone except you’

At first, when the hearing began on Monday, the atmosphere in courtroom 12 was strained. Tarrant, a self-professed white supremacist, sat just metres from those speaking to him and given earlier statements that he would use the court proceedings to spread his extremist views, many were nervous about how he would behave.

Hisham al Zarzour was among them; the Syrian man arrived in New Zealand seven months before the shootings and sustained nerve damage from being shot at Al Noor mosque that could be permanent. He will shortly have surgery on broken bones in his hand.

Worried that supporters of the gunman would gather at the road blockades outside the courthouse, or that Tarrant would say or do things to make matters worse, al Zarzour came hesitantly to watch the proceedings. He did not intend to speak to the court.

“I find it’s hard to read in front of his face how much it affects me,” said al Zarzour, a husband and father of three small children, referring to the attacks. “I can’t read it in front of anyone but to read it in front of the person who make that happen … this will make me feel weak, and he will feel like he wins.”

But as the hearing’s first two days wore on, the Muslim community made the courthouse their own, with laughter and hugs in the hallways and moments of connection everywhere; soon the mood of strength and encouragement began to leak into courtroom 12 as well.

“Good afternoon to everyone, except you,” Wasseim Alsati Daragmih told the gunman, prompting laughter in the court. Daragmih also told the killer that he and his then four-year-old daughter had survived the massacre because “you don’t know how to use a gun”, except at point-blank range.

His statement appeared to prompt a surge of courage. Others took up his cry: “As-salaam alaikum to everyone, but not to you,” another of the victims said, and more repeated it.

One man ended his statement with the words “kia kaha” – an Indigenous Maori phrase that is commonly used in New Zealand – meaning “stay strong”. That too, was picked up and repeated by others.

Many showed how closely they had examined the terrorist’s statements. Temel Atacocugu – who was shot nine times at Al Noor mosque – spoke on Monday afternoon before undergoing surgery on his damaged left arm on Tuesday.

“I am a strong, stubborn Turkish man,” he told the court, glaring at the gunman with a strong emphasis on the word “Turkish”. Atacocugu had read of the terrorist’s particular xenophobia against Turks.

On Tuesday evening, after his surgery, he sat in his warm living room surrounded by friends, his arm propped up on a stack of pillows.

“I wish I could read his mind to know what he is thinking when I said I am Turkish,” Atacocugu said, with a smile.

By Wednesday, dozens more victims had signed up at the last moment to give statements in court, buoyed by the gunman’s complete lack of response and the success of their friends.

Al Zarzour was among them. A gentle man who worked as a history and geography teacher when he lived in Syria, he was particularly perturbed by what he said was Tarrant’s poor grasp of historical facts in his manifesto.

“We wrote the history,” he told a pale, impassive Tarrant. “We are the people who wrote that history but your idea about history, it was just nothing.”

He did not tell his enemy of his pain or sleepless nights.

“In our faith, our innocent people, they are in the heaven,” he said. “And you are as a coward, you will be in the hell.”

After the dozens of statements had concluded, and prosecutors had made a case for a sentence of life without parole for the man they called “New Zealand’s worst murderer”, the terrorist had the opportunity to argue for a lesser sentence.

He had nothing to say.

“This his choice,” said Atacocugu. “I chose to speak and if he chooses to be quiet, this is his choice.”

“The people, they speak so much that he has no words,” a triumphant al Zarzour told the Guardian. “This makes me feel better.”

Pitiless, cruel and wicked

Before the judge began reading his sentence – an extraordinary two-hour statement in which he referenced all of the dead and bullet-wounded victims by name – he warned those in the public gallery to remain calm.

It is a fairly normal caution when emotions are running high, but the victims did not know that, and in the additional courtrooms where dozens more watched proceedings on video screens, murmurs began to spread – two people there told the Guardian – that they should expect the worst; the judge must not have elected life without parole after all.

They need not have worried.

“Your crimes … are so wicked that even if you are detained until you die, it will not exhaust the requirements of punishment and denunciation,” said Justice Cameron Mander.

When he told Tarrant – who he described as pitiless, cruel and wicked – he would never walk free and the gunman was led away – as blank-faced as when he entered court on Monday – the watchers, perhaps mindful of the judge’s earlier warning, sat in stunned silence.

But on the street outside the court, where the terrorist’s victims emerged to wild cheers and a guitar singalong from members of the public gathered there, the celebrations began. At many homes around Christchurch, they lasted into the night.

Psychological reports discussed during the hearing had noted that recently Tarrant had expressed some remorse for the massacre, which he told psychiatrists he had committed due to feeling depressed and ostracised from society, rather than for racist, xenophobic reasons. Justice Mander doubted whether these claims were genuine.

Maysoon Salama, whose son Atta Elayyan was killed and her husband badly wounded at Al Noor mosque, said the reports had given her a glimmer of hope – that the gunman would take the chance to ask her and the other victims for their forgiveness.

“For him not saying anything, it was relieving for me, but I was still hoping to feel some kind of remorse from his side saying sorry,” she told the Guardian. “And he didn’t.”

The gunman had performed the massacre for an online far-right audience, but following his sentence those he wished to impress did not have much to say about him either.

Blair Cottrell, the former leader of the now-defunct Australian far-right group the United Patriots Front, who Tarrant fawned over in the years before his shooting, this month described him as “an idiot” on social media.

As news of his prison term emerged, Tarrant was barely mentioned in the forums he had once frequented. Focus had shifted to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in the US and the arrest of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse over the murder of two people in Wisconsin.

Though many still lionised the gunman, when he was mentioned it was often to be mocked.

Away from the courtroom, Milne, like dozens of other bereaved families, is left with her sadness. Thinking back to the day of the massacre, she remembers: “I feel so good that that Friday morning I tickled his foot.”

She and the other mothers who had lost children in the massacre – including three-year-old and 16-year-old boys – grieve for their unexplored potential.

“You never think that you actually could die first before your son,” said Milne. “We miss knowing what they are becoming.”

Additional reporting by Michael McGowan