(Bloomberg) — One of the four hostages held by a gunman at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, has been released uninjured, the Associated Press reported.
The gunman took a rabbi and three of his congregation hostage during a livestreamed Facebook service at the synagogue in the Dallas area Saturday morning.
Police surrounded Congregation Beth Israel and evacuated nearby residents. FBI negotiators remain on the scene, and SWAT trucks are in the area.
Local police said in a statement Saturday afternoon that no injuries had been reported. Negotiations were ongoing.
President Joe Biden has been briefed and his senior team is monitoring the situation, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a tweet. Gov. Gregg Abbott is also being kept abreast of the situation.
“We believe the condition of the hostages is fine,” Harold Gernsbacher, chairman of the Secure Community Network, an organization responsible for the safety of Jewish organizations across the U.S., said in an interview at the scene.
The SCN believes the hostage-taker has strong concerns related to a female who is incarcerated at Fort Worth and has a “relationship with Al-Qaeda,” Gernsbacher said.
News of the incident rippled across the Dallas-area Jewish community, triggering a flurry of texts and emails and spurring rabbis from around the U.S. to interrupt their Sabbath pause in electronic communications to voice concern on social media.
Beth Israel is among the smaller congregations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the shock hit hard at other synagogues in a region where Jews are a tiny minority and security is always top of mind.
The situation is one of the first such publicized incidents at a U.S. synagogue since the pandemic began in 2020.
Attacks on U.S. institutions by Islamic extremists have been on the decline in recent years. The most recent was in December 2019, when a gunman with ties to al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch killed three people at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, according to an article in the Washington Post by Daniel Byman, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
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