The man who held four people hostage at a Texas synagogue was identified by US authorities as a British citizen on Sunday, while UK police later arrested two teenagers over an attack that US President Joe Biden called an “act of terror.”
The captor, who died in the 10-hour siege in the small town of Colleyville on Saturday, was named by the FBI as 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram.
Hours later, Britain’s counterterrorism police arrested two people and were questioning them in connection with the incident.
Photo: Reuters
“Two teenagers were detained in South Manchester this evening. They remain in custody,” Greater Manchester Police said in a statement.
The FBI’s field office in Dallas had earlier said there was “no indication” that anyone else was involved in the attack on the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue.
The four hostages — including a respected local rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker — were all freed unharmed on Saturday night, prompting relief in the US, where the Jewish community and Biden renewed calls to fight anti-Semitism.
“There is no question that this was a traumatic experience,” Cytron-Walker said in a statement on Sunday. “We are resilient and we will recover.”
A man identifying himself as Akram’s brother Gulbar wrote on Facebook that the suspect had suffered from mental health problems.
“We would like to say that we as a family do not condone any of his actions and would like to sincerely apologize wholeheartedly to all the victims involved in the unfortunate incident,” Gulbar wrote in the post to a Muslim community Facebook page in Blackburn, England, where British police said Akram was from.
Biden declined to speculate on the motive, but appeared to confirm reports that the hostage-taker was seeking the release of convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist known as “Lady al-Qaeda.”
“This was an act of terror” committed by an assailant who apparently “insisted on the release of someone who’s been in prison for over 10 years,” Biden told reporters during a visit to a hunger relief organization in Philadelphia.
British Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs Liz Truss on Sunday also condemned the hostage-taking as an “act of terrorism and anti-Semitism.”
Siddiqui, the first woman to be suspected by the US of links to al-Qaeda, and a cause celebre in Pakistan and South Asian jihadist circles, was detained in Afghanistan in 2008.
Two years later, she was sentenced by a New York court to 86 years in prison for the attempted murder of US military officers in Afghanistan.
She is being held at a prison in Fort Worth, Texas — about 32km from the synagogue that Akram attacked.
Cytron-Walker in his statement credited his congregation’s previous security training from the FBI and others for their survival from a harrowing ordeal.
“In the last hour of our hostage crisis, the gunman became increasingly belligerent and threatening,” the rabbi said. “Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself.”
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