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Texas hostage taker was known to British intelligence

The town of Blackburn, in northwestern England, is where Malik Faisal Akram, identified by the FBI as the man who took hostages at a Texas synagogue, was raised.Mary Turner/NYT

The British man who took four people hostage at a Texas synagogue over the weekend before being killed was known to British intelligence services, according to a US official and British news media reports.

The man, whom the FBI identified as Malik Faisal Akram, 44, had been on the watch list of Britain’s MI5 security service as a “subject of interest” in 2020, according to a US official briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

But by the time he flew to the United States, he had been deemed to no longer be a risk, the BBC reported Tuesday. The Guardian, citing government sources, reported that it was a midlevel investigation in the second half of 2020.

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Akram, originally from the northern British town of Blackburn, had arrived in the United States just before the New Year after leaving Britain on Dec. 29, but much is still unknown about why he targeted the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, during a Saturday morning service. Britain’s Home Office declined to comment on the case or confirm the BBC report.

Gulbar Akram, Akram’s brother, has described his sibling as mentally unwell and said he also had a criminal past and was known to British police. He questioned how his brother was allowed to enter the United States, but he maintained that he did not believe his brother was antisemitic.

The family said they had been cooperating with British authorities, and Gulbar Akram spoke with his brother during the 11-hour standoff, trying to persuade him to release the hostages and turn himself in.

Two teenagers were arrested Sunday night in the northern British city of Manchester “as part of the ongoing investigation into the attack that took place at a Synagogue in Texas,” the Greater Manchester Police said in a statement.

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All four people who were held hostage by Faisal Akram in Texas, including the rabbi of the synagogue, made it out unharmed. One man was released a few hours after the standoff began. The rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker, described how hours later, he pushed a chair at Akram, who was wielding a gun, and the remaining three men ran for the door.

Law enforcement then entered the building, and Akram was shot and killed. The FBI said in a statement over the weekend that there was no indication anyone else was involved in the hostage-taking incident.

Cytron-Walker attributed the escape by the hostages to years of security training, after threats to a number of other synagogues. In an interview with The New York Times, Cytron-Walker said he had taken part in at least four separate trainings in recent years.

Akram claimed when he took the hostages at the synagogue that he had guns and two bombs and was “not afraid to pull the strings,” according to a federal law enforcement official. He also demanded to speak to a Jewish leader in New York or he would shoot hostages, the official said.

During the incident he was also heard referencing Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who was convicted in a federal court in 2010 of trying to kill U.S. military officers while she was in custody in Afghanistan. She is serving an 86-year prison sentence in Fort Worth, not far from Colleyville.

The FBI is investigating how he acquired the gun.

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President Joe Biden on Sunday called the attack an act of terrorism, and Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, said that Britain condemned the “act of terrorism and anti-Semitism.”