An unidentified suspect drove his vehicle into the building and opened fire, authorities confirmed
Authorities identified the suspect in a Thursday afternoon attack on a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Mich., as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese-born man who entered the United States in 2011 and became a naturalized citizen in 2016.
Ghazali, who reportedly worked in a restaurant in Dearborn Heights, is dead after engaging in gunfire with armed security, authorities said.
“We can’t say what killed him at this point,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County, Mich., said at a news conference, “but security did engage the suspect with gunfire.”
The suspect drove his vehicle “into the building and we then had shots fired,” the West Bloomfield police department confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.
The suspect was reportedly armed with a rifle and killed in a shootout with security patrolling Temple Israel’s grounds, according to Fox News. The attacker’s vehicle is said to have caught fire, burning the body inside. Bouchard told reporters at the scene that the suspect’s vehicle hit a security guard, knocking him unconscious, in the only reported injury resulting from the attack, the Detroit Free Press reported. Law enforcement officials also said emergency responders found what appeared to be explosives in the back of the vehicle.
Those inside the Reform synagogue and surrounding areas were instructed to shelter in place as police investigated the scene to determine if others were involved in the attack. Several children were also reportedly evacuated from the building and relocated to a safer location.
“We just tell people [to] shelter in place for at least a mile area until we determine that there’s no one else that maybe was on foot and fled the area, until we figure out exactly what’s going on,” Bouchard said.
Bouchard also noted that “Jewish facilities in the area are going to have a lot of extra presence around it until we figure this out.”
Temple Israel said in a statement posted to Facebook that it “was the victim of a terrorist gunman who was confronted and neutralized by our security personnel.” All 140 students who were attending classes at the time of the attack are “accounted for and safe,” as well as teachers and other staff members, the synagogue said.
Synagogues across the country have increased security during a wave of anti-Semitic violence in the time since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. The Anti-Defamation League reported in its 2024 audit of anti-Semitic attacks that synagogues in particular saw an uptick in “bomb threats” and other forms of harassment or vandalism. Synagogues, the watchdog group reported, “faced hundreds of bomb threats over the course of the year, which included messages such as: ‘You Jews will pay for your crimes, we will end your lives,’ as well as anti-Israel messages.”
In June of last year, Mohamed Sabry Soliman was charged with multiple hate crimes for tossing two Molotov cocktails into a crowd of pro-Israel demonstrators while shouting, “Free Palestine.” A month earlier, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. When apprehended by police, Rodriguez said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
FBI director Kash Patel separately confirmed that federal authorities “are on the scene with partners in Michigan.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Read the full article here
