(Bloomberg) — All hostages held by a gunman at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, have been freed, while the captor is reported to be dead.
“Prayers answered,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a tweet. “All hostages are out alive and safe.”
The hostage-taker is dead, the Associated Press reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement official. 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 earlier surrounded Congregation Beth Israel and evacuated nearby residents. FBI negotiators were on the scene, and SWAT trucks were present in the area.
President Joe Biden was briefed and his senior team was monitoring the situation, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a tweet.
Harold Gernsbacher, chairman of the Secure Community Network, an organization responsible for the safety of Jewish organizations across the U.S., said it was believed the hostage-taker has strong concerns related to a female who is incarcerated at Fort Worth and has a “relationship with Al-Qaeda.”
The gunman was heard demanding the release of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, who is in a Texas federal prison, the Associated Press reported, citing officials it didn’t identify.
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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