(Bloomberg) — An armed gunman took a rabbi and three of his congregation hostage during a livestreamed Facebook service at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
“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 Saturday.
Police have surrounded Congregation Beth Israel and have evacuated nearby residents. FBI negotiators are on the scene, and SWAT trucks have arrived in the area.
Police at the scene have not provided any update.
It’s one of the first such publicized incidents at a U.S. synagogue since the pandemic began in 2020.
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.
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.
President Joe Biden has been briefed and his senior team is monitoring the situation, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a tweet.
(Adds in first paragraph that event took place during livestreamed service.)
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