MANCHESTER, England — One of two victims slain during the attack on a synagogue in northern England on Yom Kippur was killed by a bullet fired by the police, apparently as they gunned down the attacker who had stabbed people and appeared to be wearing an explosive belt, authorities said Friday.
One of three victims seriously injured in the incident and still hospitalized was also struck by a bullet, the police said. The attacker, identified by police, was not believed to have had a gun, the Greater Manchester Police said in its statement.
“The only shots fired were from GMP’s Authorized Firearms Officers as they worked to prevent the offender from entering the synagogue and causing further harm to our Jewish community,” the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, Sir Stephen Watson, said in the statement. “It follows therefore, that subject to further forensic examination, this injury may sadly have been sustained as a tragic and unforeseen consequence of the urgently required action taken by my officers to bring this vicious attack to an end.”
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The apparent friendly fire death added a gruesome twist to an attack that shocked Britain.
On a Friday morning that was supposed to offer a brief interlude between the cloistered day of fasting and prayer of Yom Kippur, and the weekly restful rites of the Sabbath, Jewish residents of the Heaton Park neighborhood found themselves in a community shaken by violence — surrounded by yellow-vested police officers and their streets lined with patrol cars.
The misty gray day in northern England was a mix of the routine and the surreal as locals shopped for food and flowers, but also hugged each other and swapped information, trying to sort face from rumor on the day after the attacker rammed his car into worshipers at the neighborhood synagogue and stabbed several people before being shot dead by the police.
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The attack, which the authorities labeled a “terrorist incident,” was a horrific disruption of the annual reflection and repentance on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, but for many also a dreaded, seemingly inevitable result of a global rise in antisemitism and violence against Jews, including in Britain where many congregations now routinely maintain high security.
The man, identified as Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, a British citizen of Syrian descent, was wearing a vest that “had the appearance of an explosive device” when he was shot, authorities said — seven minutes after the first emergency call for help.
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Authorities so far have not connected Al-Shamie to any outside group or international organization, according to officials familiar with the investigation.
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The terror designation “points to what is believed to be the motive for the attack,” said a British security official, but “doesn’t point to the fact that there is a network or group behind it necessarily.”
Officials noted that authorities are in the very early stages of recovering the suspect’s cellphones, laptops or other devices so that teams of experts from the police and MI5, the domestic intelligence service, can scour them for clues about further threats or any evidence that others were involved in the synagogue attack.
“We are still at the point where police are seizing media from various locations,” a second official said. That work was delayed in part by concern that the suspect was wearing an explosive device, necessitating additional precautions.
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“Until we analyze [recovered devices] we are not really in position to understand motivation or if others are involved,” the official said.
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Authorities early Friday identified the two slain victims: Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66 — “the two innocent members of our Jewish Community who sadly died as a result of the incident at Heaton Park Congregation Synagogue,” according to a statement by the Greater Manchester Police.
They did not say which of the victims was shot.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct, a watchdog that oversees behavior of law enforcement officers, said it was launching an investigation — standard procedure after a fatal shooting. Less than 5 percent of officers in England and Wales carry guns. Police shootings are extremely rare. Between April 2024 and March 2025, officers discharged their weapons at people during four operations.
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Both of the deceased victims were residents of Crumpsall, this mixed North Manchester community where kosher groceries and Muslim halal butchers line the same blocks. The neighborhood is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Manchester, the British city with the largest Jewish population outside London, numbering about 30,000.
Al-Shamie, the alleged attacker, was apparently a neighbor as well. The police said he lived a six-minute drive on the other side of Heaton Park, according to local reports of his address in the Prestwich area. Al-Shamie had entered the United Kingdom as a young child, police said, and had not appeared on terrorist watch lists.
Residents of the street where Al-Shamie reportedly lived said police teams swarmed the area on Thursday. Police, who also searched houses in the Crumpsall neighborhood, said they had arrested three others in connection with the synagogue attack, two men in their 30s and a woman in her 60s. They gave few details and said investigators were still “working to understand the motive.”
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Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Friday that Al-Shamie was not previously under surveillance or considered a threat by British counterterrorism authorities.
In Britain, a terror attack is one “motivated to further a political or religious or ideological cause,” the first security official said, noting that British law enforcement agencies gain special authorities in terror-related investigations.
For many, however, the timing on Yom Kippur made the assailant’s intentions plain.
“I think for everyone in this neighborhood the motive seems very clear,” said Russell Bernstein, a local city council member. “It was a terror attack on Jewish people. We all just hope it’s over.”
Quick action by congregants and the police prevented the attacker from entering the synagogue, where morning services were already underway, authorities said.
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Many residents were too nervous to talk or be identified by name. Several cited the ongoing investigation and the additional arrests announced Thursday.
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“It feels like it’s still going on,” said Gerald, a 26-year-old bookkeeper who grew up in the area, who, dressed in black coat and white shirt, was at K Outlet, a kosher grocery.
His brother and family live in an apartment next door to the synagogue and witnessed the attack unfold. They were evacuated and still have not been let back into their house.
“He doesn’t even have his phone or keys with him,” said Gerald, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used.
He was 18 when a previous major terrorist attack struck Manchester, a 2017 bombing at the Manchester Arena following an Ariana Grande concert that killed 22. This incident, while less deadly, has caused more anxiety in the Jewish community, Gerald said.
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“That was not a Jewish event; we were no more scared than everyone else was,” he said. “This time they targeted a synagogue on Jews’ holiest day.”
The police presence remained heavy throughout the neighborhood on Friday morning, with roads cordoned off and patrol vans blocking intersections around the synagogue. Manchester police said they would step up patrols and would be present at synagogues and other places of worship for days to come, hoping to reassure anxious worshipers.
“People in North Manchester, Bury, Salford, within Jewish communities, and around synagogues can expect to see uniformed officers on patrol in vehicles and on foot throughout today, into this evening, and over the weekend,” City of Manchester District Commander David Meeney said in a statement. “We are conscious of the significance of Fridays and Saturdays in the Jewish faith, and will be doing everything we can to help communities mark Shabbat with their families and friends as they wish.”
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The attack on Friday reverberated across Britain.
London’s Metropolitan Police called for the cancellation of a rally planned for Saturday to protest the banning of the group Palestine Action, saying the demonstration was diverting limited law enforcement resources.
“At a time when we want to be deploying every available officer to ensure the safety of those communities, we are instead having to plan for a gathering of more than 1,000 people in Trafalgar Square on Saturday in support of a terrorist organization,” the police said in a statement.
In July, the government outlawed Palestine Action under its anti-terrorism laws. Since then, hundreds of people have been arrested for supporting the group. Organizers of this weekend’s demonstration, Defend Our Juries, rejected the police call on social media, writing: “Don’t arrest us then … We are peacefully protesting against U.K. complicity in genocide.”
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In Manchester, the area around the synagogue on Middleton Road has seen an influx of Jewish residents in recent years, said Avi Rosenfeld, a local real estate agent who was showing properties on Friday morning. The Heaton Park synagogue has expanded with newcomers, Rosenfeld said.
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He described the area as quiet, close-knit and largely free of antisemitic incidents over recent years.
“There have been little things,” he said, “but nothing on this scale.”
However, tension has been rising in the last three years, he said, since the Hamas attacks in Israel in October 2023 and the war in Gaza that has raged ever since. Last week, Rosenfeld reported some graffiti he found in a gas station bathroom: “Israel is a global scum.”
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It was still there three days later, he said, adding that Jewish residents here do not feel protected.
“It’s Israel, but people don’t make a distinction between Israel and any Jews,” he said. Rosenfeld knew one of the dead victims, Cravitz, who worked in neighborhood grocery stores for years. The other victim, Daulby, was well-known to Rosenfeld’s wife as a relative by marriage. “Everybody knows everybody here,” he said.
Rosenfeld said the revelation that a victim had been shot by police did not change the grief or the guilt in the attack.
“I am 100 percent sure the police did their very best under impossible circumstances, and if a mistake happened, it was without bad intentions,” he said. “These things, sadly, can happen in combat zones. For me and my community, it doesn’t change the grief we feel, we are mourning a terrible loss.”
[SRC] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/10/03/synagogue-yom-kippur-attack-england/
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