Texas synagogue hostages freed, gunman dead after standoff

All hostages held by a gunman at a synagogue in Texas have been freed after a standoff that ended in the death of their captor.

A rescue team breached the synagogue in Colleyville and freed three of the four people who were taken hostage, the city’s police chief Michael Miller said in a televised news briefing. One was released earlier.

The gunman took a rabbi and three members of Congregation Beth Israel hostage during a livestreamed Facebook service at the synagogue in the Dallas area Saturday morning. He 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.

“We believe that he was singularly focused on one issue,” Matthew DeSarno, an FBI special agent, said during the news briefing. It is believed the incident “was not targeted at the Jewish community,” he said.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who was briefed of the situation, said more will be known “in the days ahead about the motivations of the hostage taker.”

“But let me be clear to anyone who intends to spread hate — we will stand against anti-Semitism and against the rise of extremism in this country,” Biden said in a statement after the standoff.

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.”

Authorities said the hostages were unharmed and do not require medical attention, while the crime scene is being processed.

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 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.