Reports Say Manchester Synagogue Attacker Was on Bail Over Rape

Israeli media relayed two strands of British reporting about the man who attacked a synagogue in Manchester, in northern England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. According to a summary issued through the Press Service of Israel on 3 October 2025, The Guardian reported that Jihad al-Shami, who carried out the attack, had been due to appear in court to face rape charges.

The same summary said the Daily Mail reported that al-Shami’s father, Faraj al-Shami, who works as a surgeon, had celebrated the 7 October 2023 massacre in Israel and praised Hamas. “Take good care of your weapons and aim them precisely for your brothers,” the father wrote on Facebook hours after the attack began, according to that paper.

What happened at Heaton Park on Yom Kippur

The attack itself took place on 2 October 2025 at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester. The Times of Israel reported on 4 October, drawing on survivors’ accounts, that a car was driven into the synagogue gates at about 9.31am and that the attacker got out with a knife and stabbed people near the entrance while congregants barricaded the doors from the inside. Two worshippers were killed and four people were seriously hurt. Armed police arrived within minutes and shot the attacker dead; worshippers looking out afterwards saw him lying with what appeared to be explosives strapped to his waist. The whole attack was over in less than seven minutes. Police later arrested three other people on suspicion of terrorism-related offences.

Why the case landed so hard on Britain’s Jewish community

It was the first killing of its kind in Britain in four decades of record-keeping. The Community Security Trust, the charity that records antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom, described the Heaton Park attack as the most serious antisemitic incident of 2025 and the first fatal antisemitic terror attack since it began compiling figures in 1984, the Jerusalem Post reported in February 2026. The same report put the charity’s 2025 total at 3,700 incidents, the second-highest annual figure it has recorded, up 4 per cent on 2024, with more than 200 incidents in every single month of the year for the first time.

The trend was already visible before the attack. The Times of Israel reported on 6 August 2025 that the charity had logged 1,521 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2025, down 25 per cent on the record set in the same period of 2024, but still the second-highest half-year total ever recorded, with more than half of the incidents linked to the war in Gaza.

The date the father’s post refers to

The Facebook message quoted by the Daily Mail was written, that paper said, in the hours after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel began on 7 October 2023. The Anti-Defamation League’s timeline of the war records that at least 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted into Gaza that day.

What is still unclear

The release is a summary of other outlets’ reporting rather than an original account, and Israel.com has not seen the underlying court, police or social media records. It did not say what stage the rape case had reached, which court was involved, or when any hearing had been listed. It gave no source for the father’s employment beyond the Daily Mail, and no response from either man’s family or from British police.