A man took several hostages at a Texas synagogue on Saturday during a service streamed online. The police are conducting “tense” negotiations with the hostage-taker. This is reported by international news agencies.
One hostage was released unharmed Saturday night (local time), six hours after the hostage-taking began in a Dallas suburb of Colleyville. An unknown number of other hostages are still being held. According to anonymous sources from the AP news agency, it initially concerned at least four hostages, including the rabbi.
Authorities are trying to determine the motive for the attack. The service’s live stream on the synagogue’s Facebook page featured a tirade from the hostage-taker, demanding the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani jihadi suspected of having ties to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Siddiqui, a scientist nicknamed ‘Lady Qaida’, was sentenced in 2010 by a US judge to 86 years in prison for the attempted murder of US servicemen in Afghanistan and is in a federal prison in Texas.
Mobile unit
The live stream did not show what was happening in the synagogue. The live stream ended around 2 a.m. local time. A spokesperson for tech company Meta, the parent company of Facebook, confirmed that the social medium has removed the video.
Police evacuated the area surrounding the synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, after an emergency call came in shortly before 11 a.m. The mobile unit is present at the synagogue. No injuries were reported, and it was unclear whether the hostage-taker was armed.
His identity was also unclear. According to several people, the hostage-taker described Siddiqui in the livestream as his “sister”. But according to Faizan Syed, the head of the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Dallas-Fort Worth, Siddiqui’s brother, Mohammad Siddiqui, was not involved in the hostage situation, the AP writes.
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