Who’s Malik Faisal Akram, the hostage taker at Texas synagogue?
Texas: The FBI identified a hostage taker killed at a Texas synagogue as a British citizen, after U.S. President Joe Biden earlier on Sunday said the gunman had used weapons he got off the street to commit “an act of terror.”
The FBI identified the man as Malik Faisal Akram, 44, who was killed after the safe release of his four hostages on Saturday night from the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. According to the US media, , Malik Faisal Akram is British-Pakistani from Blackburn. He was not living in US and had recently travelled there before carrying out the attack on the synagogue in Colleyville.
His brother Gulbar posted on Facebook that the suspect, from the industrial town of Blackburn, in the north of England, suffered from mental illness and said the family had spent all night at the Blackburn police station “liaising with Faisal, the negotiators, FBI etc.”
The hostage-taker claimed to be the brother of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, who is serving an 86-year U.S. prison sentence on her 2010 conviction for shooting at soldiers and FBI agents, and demanded that she be freed, a U.S. official told ABC News.
Siddiqui is being held at a federal prison in the Fort Worth area. A lawyer representing Siddiqui, Marwa Elbially, told CNN in a statement that the man was not Siddiqui’s brother and Siddiqui’s family condemned his “heinous” actions.