Manchester synagogue attacker named as Jihad al-Shamie, British citizen on bail for rape charge

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - Shamie entered the United Kingdom as a small child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around 16. — Picture via X

LONDON, Oct 4 — The attacker who targeted a British synagogue, Jihad al-Shamie, was a British citizen of Syrian descent who was on police bail for a rape charge, police said yesterday.

Police late Thursday had named 35-year-old Shamie as the perpetrator of the attack in Manchester, in which two people were killed and three others seriously wounded. Police shot him dead within seven minutes of worshippers raising the alarm.

Shamie entered the United Kingdom as a small child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around 16.

His family has lived in the Manchester area for at least 30 years and currently reside in the town of Prestwich, some three kilometres (two miles) from the scene of the attack, in the Manchester suburb of Crumpsall, the Daily Mail reported.

ITV News reported the attacker was “understood to have worked as a tutor teaching English and computer programming”.

Police confirmed that Shamie had not been referred to the government’s anti-terrorism programme Prevent and was not known to security services.

But they said he “may have been influenced by extreme Islamist ideology” and confirmed that he had recently been given police bail for an alleged rape.

The Arabic word Jihad, meaning “striving” or “struggling”, is a common boy’s name in Muslim communities.

‘Scruffily dressed’ 

The Times newspaper reported that police were investigating whether threatening emails sent by a man identifying himself as Jihad Alshamie in 2012 to a then-Conservative MP came from the attacker.

Shamie’s father is believed to be a trauma doctor who has worked for several NGOs in war zones, the Daily Mail reported. A LinkedIn page for a man of that name describes him as a trauma and war surgeon.

A video posted on the International Committee of the Red Cross archive dated 2015 shows a surgeon of that name working in South Sudan. He is a softly spoken grey-haired man in scrubs.

A YouTube account has the same video, and home videos of the doctor’s family, including a visit to Homs in Syria.

One video names one of his three children as Jihad. It shows the youngsters playing in the garden of a house.

Police stood guard outside an address in a street of semi-detached houses in Prestwich on Friday, AFP journalists saw.

The Sun newspaper quoted a neighbour, Kate McLeish, as saying the attacker was “very scruffily dressed” and “wore pyjamas and flipflops”.

An unnamed neighbour told the Daily Telegraph that Shamie had lived there for 10 years “with no wife or kids that I could see”.

She said he “never seemed to speak to anyone round here”.

“He was quite bulked up and used to keep his exercise weights in his garage. I’d see them there,” she said.

Another neighbour, Geoff Haliwell, told the Times that the attacker often used a weightlifting bench in the front garden.

“I think he was the oldest of three brothers. One of the others moved out a few years ago. The dad came back occasionally,” Haliwell said. — AFP