Dual attacks rattle Michigan synagogue, Old Dominion
What happened
A man rammed a truck into a Michigan synagogue Thursday, hours after a convicted Islamic State supporter opened fire in a classroom at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, killing one person and wounding two. Both of the attackers were killed. None of the staff or 140 preschoolers at Temple Israel in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield Township were injured. “The back-to-back outbursts of violence added to rising concerns about the possibility of attacks on U.S. soil amid the tension since U.S. and Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Iran,” Reuters said.
Who said what
The gunman at Old Dominion, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, was a former member of the Army National Guard who was arrested in 2016 for plotting an ISIS-inspired attack. He served eight years in prison. ROTC students in the classroom “rendered him no longer alive” after he started shooting, FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans said, crediting their “extreme bravery and courage” for stopping the attack. Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” before the shooting, Evans told reporters.
In the attack at Temple Israel, the nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Lebanon-born U.S. citizen Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove his truck through the doors and down a hallway before temple security “engaged the individual and neutralized the threat,” West Bloomfield Police Chief Dale Young said. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said “something ignited in the vehicle” after the crash. Ghazali’s vehicle was carrying “mortar-type explosives,” CBS News said, citing two law enforcement officers. It wasn’t clear whether Ghazali was shot by security guards or killed himself.
Investigators are trying to determine the motives in both shootings, but Ghazali was “devastated” after an Israeli airstrike on his family’s village in Lebanon “roughly 10 days prior” killed two of his brothers and two of their children, CBS News said, citing a source in Michigan’s Lebanese American community. “What happens around the world sometimes affects us, so we have to prepare for it,” Bouchard said at a news conference.
What next?
The FBI said it was investigating the synagogue attack as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community,” and the Old Dominion shooting as an act of terrorism.