Malik Faisal Akram, 44, who was identified as the gunman who held four people hostage inside a Texas synagogue, was reportedly known to British intelligence agencies and had a criminal record.
Akram held the four hostages in Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville for nearly 12 hours on January 15; one hostage was released and the rest later escaped after one of the hostages, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, threw a chair at Akram. Akram was subsequently killed by the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. His reported motivation was the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who is serving an 86-year prison sentence for attempting to kill United States soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan. Siddiqui has stated through an attorney that she had nothing to do with the hostage crisis and denounced it.
According to various reports, Akram was put on MI5’s “subject of interest” watchlist for more than four weeks toward the end of 2020 for being a potential Islamist terror threat, but was subsequently removed from it after British intelligence he did not present a terror threat at that time. Akram was reportedly imprisoned in 1996, 1997, and 1999 for violent disorder, property destruction, harassment and theft; he was also arrested in 2012 but the charges against him were dropped. Additionally, Akram was reportedly barred from a British court in 2001 after he allegedly telling one of the court ushers, “You should have been on the f—ing plane.”
A former neighbor of Akram told The Telegraph that in 2017, Akram became “radicalized” and “absolutely obsessive” about Islamic fundamentalism; his family, by contrast, believes in a more moderate form of Islam. Akram’s brother, Gulbar, told The New York Times that Akram had been dealing with mental health issues that were exacerbated after his other brother died from COVID-19 a few months ago.
“Why would a man on MI5 radar be able to obtain visa?” the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked in a tweet. “FBI special forces saved the day. But how did other agencies allow him into [the] US?”
Why would a man on MI5 radar be able to obtain visa? FBI special forces saved the day. But how did other agencies allow him into US? https://t.co/0xAZ1KFD9V
— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) January 18, 2022
When a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki that very question, she replied: “Our understanding, and obviously we’re still looking into this, is that he was checked against U.S. government databases multiple times prior to entering the country, and the U.S. government did not have any derogatory information about the individual in our systems at the time of entry.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in the conservative publication National Review, “Any one of these three criteria—criminal history, mental illness, or terrorism sympathies—is sufficient by itself to exclude an alien from the United States. There is increasingly good reason to believe Akram hit the trifecta . . . and got in anyway.” He also noted that President Joe Biden had revoked a Trump administration executive order requiring foreign nationals to be more extensively vetted prior to entering the United States and “that the FBI is hypersensitive to complaints from Islamist organizations about ‘Islamophobia’ in the application of immigration restrictions.” “So naturally the question arises: How energetic is our counterterrorism vetting of aliens seeking entry into the United States now that Biden has countermanded Trump’s heightened vetting?” McCarthy asked.
