CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — They came together as one, more than 1,000 students from rival Christchurch schools and different religions, joining voices to honor the 50 lives lost in a massacre that has deeply wounded the cozy New Zealand city.

In a park across from the Al Noor mosque, where dozens were killed by a white supremacist gunman, the students sat on the grass Monday, lifting flickering candles as they sang a traditional Maori song.

Hundreds then stood to perform a passionate, defiant haka, the famed ceremonial dance of the indigenous Maori people.

For many, joining the vigil for the victims of the mass shooting was a much-needed opportunity to soothe their minds after a wrenching few days. Most of the students spent hours locked down in their schools on Friday as police tried to determine if any other shooters were involved in the attacks.

Those at the vigil told harrowing tales of being forced to hide under classroom tables or on a school stage behind a curtain, of being instructed not to speak, and to urinate in a bucket rather than risk leaving the classroom.

Sarah Liddell, 17, said many of her peers felt intense anxiety since the attack. There was a sense of safety in coming together Monday, she said.

“I feel like it’s just really important to show everyone that one act of violence doesn’t define a whole city,” she said. “This is one of the best ways to show everyone coming together. Some schools have little funny rivalries, but in times like this ... that’s all forgotten.”

The students draped a fence along the park with colorful paper notes, each emblazoned with messages of love and hope and sorrow: “You are not alone.” “This is your home. You are part of us.” “We all bleed the same colour.”

For 17-year-old Portia Raharaha, who attended the vigil with other students from her Catholic high school, watching the haka was particularly moving.

“All the races combining, all students, all ages, both genders, we’re all just coming together,” Raharaha said. “It definitely makes you feel like New Zealand really does come together in a time of darkness and we can really just be who we are,” she said. “Nothing has really changed. Maybe it’s shaken us, but it really hasn’t changed us.”

After the ceremony officially ended, many lingered, standing in circles, arms draped around each other’s shoulders, singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Maori songs. People wandered around with “free hugs” signs, embracing those in need. There were tears, but also smiles.

The students’ vigil was a striking and healing counterpoint to Monday’s developments in the shooting.

In other developments, a Christchurch gun shop acknowledged selling guns online to the 28-year-old white supremacist accused in the massacre that upturned New Zealand’s reputation as one of the world’s most tolerant and safe nations.

At a news conference, Gun City owner David Tipple said the store sold four guns and ammunition to Brenton Harrison Tarrant through a “police-verified online mail order process.” The store “detected nothing extraordinary” about the buyer, he said.

Separately, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said gun law reforms would be announced within 10 days and an inquiry conducted into intelligence and security services that failed to detect the risk from the attacker. There have been concerns intelligence agencies were overly focused on the Muslim community in detecting and preventing security risks.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said police are certain that Tarrant was the only gunman but aren’t ruling out that he had support.

New Zealand firms are considering whether to pull their advertisements from social media following last Friday’s terror attack on two mosques.

The Association of New Zealand Advertisers and the Commercial Communications Council put out a joint statement Monday asking firms to consider sending a similar message to social media platforms.

“The events in Christchurch raise the question, if the site owners can target consumers with advertising in microseconds, why can’t the same technology be applied to prevent this kind of content being streamed live?” the statement read.

As authorities in New Zealand and companies such as Facebook were furiously scrubbing online footage of the shooting rampage, the same disturbing footage was being shared with thousands of Turkish citizens by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan has played blurred clips of the video at campaign rallies in several Turkish cities over the past few days, to fire up his conservative Islamist supporters and attack his political opponents ahead of local elections scheduled for later this month. But his use of the footage drew a rebuke Monday from New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who said the dissemination of the video could endanger his country’s citizens.

Peters, speaking to reporters Monday after a weekly cabinet meeting, said that he had raised Erdogan’s use of the footage with an official Turkish delegation visiting New Zealand.

Peters said he told Turkish officials “that anything of that nature that misrepresents this country — given that this was a non-New Zealand citizen — imperils the future and safety of the New Zealand people and our people abroad, and it’s totally unfair.”

The Washington Post contributed.