Police in Manchester would not say whether they’d examined the cell phone of Jihad al-Shamie several months before he staged a deadly terrorist attack on a synagogue on Oct. 2, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Al-Shamie was out on bail for an alleged rape said to have taken place earlier in 2025 when he staged the Yom Kippur attack, during which he was killed by police. Al-Shamie fatally stabbed Melvin Cravitz, 66, and tried to storm the site. A police officer accidentally shot dead another person, Adrian Daulby, 53, during the assault on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation.
In an investigation into what authorities knew about al-Shamie, the Financial Times attempted to learn whether police had looked at his cell phone during his arrest for the alleged rape, but police would not divulge that information.
In October, the BBC reported that a neighbor of the Syrian-born al-Shamie said that she had called police with concerns about his activity at his home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Men were “coming and going” from the address and the neighbor had been “really worried” about a particular relative of al-Shamie, the BBC reported. Greater Manchester Police said at the time that it was not monitoring al-Shamie’s activities at the time of the attack.
“My partner and I were really worried. [The relative] stopped speaking to us, talking less and less and spending all his time praying. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with me,” the neighbor told the BBC.
Her calls to police were not returned and she “never heard back,” the neighbor said, adding, “I did feel something was not quite right.”
