New details were emerging on Friday about the life of Jihad Al-Shamie, who was shot dead by police as he attacked a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
The 35-year-old came from a Syrian émigré family who on Friday expressed horror at his “heinous act” and spoke of their “profound shock”.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood said he came to the UK as a young child and was naturalised as a citizen in 2006. Jihad was not previously known to counterterror police, she said on Friday.
Mahmood, who is Muslim, said she had “never heard someone being called Jihad”. The word means “struggle”. Jihad is a common name in the Arab world, among Christians as well as Muslims.
A picture posted on the Facebook account of his father, Faraj Al-Shamie, showed Jihad in October last year holding a baby, with the caption “Great welcome grandson”.
Jihad was the eldest of three brothers. One brother, Jawad, studied pharmacy at the University of Kent and, according to a LinkedIn account, currently works as a locum pharmacist.
The youngest brother, Kenan, studied mathematics at East Anglia and St Andrews universities, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has worked for the past five years for IBM as a software engineer.
The family has a modest council house in Prestwich, on the north side of Manchester, where neighbours told the Press Association they had seen Jihad bench pressing in the garden.
The home is two miles from the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue that Jihad attacked on Thursday by driving his car at the building during a Yom Kippur service.
He stabbed members of the congregation in the attack, which left two people dead and three people injured. Police shot Jihad dead at the scene, along with one of the deceased victims and one of the injured survivors.
His father’s Facebook page suggests the family had been in the UK since the 1990s. In a July post, Faraj recounted having been in Manchester on the day of the June 1996 IRA bombing of Manchester city centre.
In 2012, the then Conservative MP John Howell reported receiving threatening emails from “Jihad Alshamie” when he defended Israel after it carried out strikes on Gaza that year, according to a contemporary report by the Jerusalem Post. But it is not clear if the sender was the Al-Shamie who perpetrated the Manchester attack.
Last month, a Jihad Al-Shamie was recorded on an online giving portal making a £3 donation to help an orphan with special needs in Gaza.
In a statement on Friday posted on Faraj’s Facebook account, the family expressed their “deep shock and horror” at what they called his “heinous act”.
They wrote: “The Al-Shamie family in the UK and abroad strongly condemns this heinous act, which targeted peaceful, innocent civilians.
“We fully distance ourselves from this attack and express our deep shock and sorrow over what has happened. Our hearts and thoughts are with the victims and their families, and we pray for their strength and comfort.”
Faraj, a doctor who has worked in a number of conflicts around the world including in South Sudan, has posted regularly on Facebook about the turmoil in the Middle East.
On October 7 2023, he asked God to protect Palestine’s “heroic people”, and said footage of Hamas fighters attacking an Israeli military camp “with simple means” showed that “Israel will not endure”.
“Regardless of who leads them, they are the true compass: men confident in their victory even if their resources are limited,” he said. The post seemed to contrast them with Syrians before former dictator Bashar al-Assad’s fall, saying they were “divided” and “plunging to the bottom of the abyss”.
In a 2012 post, he recounted an incident from his childhood in 1967 apparently during the Six Day War between Israel and Arab states including Syria.
“Terror spread across my mother’s face when she heard the sound of airplanes that we knew were Israeli,” he wrote, saying he saw planes bomb a local radio station as he hid among fig trees with his mother.
“I wasn’t so much afraid as I was consumed with hatred for those planes . . . and for those who sent them,” he wrote.
Like many Syrians, he welcomed the overthrow of Assad last year by insurgents led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement after more than a decade of civil war, and has praised Syria’s new president Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Faraj also posted content showing sympathy with Syria’s Christian minority following attacks in the wake of the revolution against the Assad regime, and criticised sectarianism.
When clashes broke out in the southern Syria province of Sweida this summer, in which hundreds were killed in violence involving members of the Druze religious minority and Syrian security forces, Faraj condemned those who carried out killings in the name of Islam.
“Our faith forbids us from injustice, tyranny, and hatred. It commands us to aid the distressed, to defend the oppressed, and to uphold justice among people, without discrimination based on their religion or their beliefs,” he wrote.
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