US President Joe Biden on Sunday responded to the hostage-taking incident at a Texas synagogue on Saturday, and described the incident as “an act of terror”.
“This was an act of terror. This was an act of terror. And it not only was related to someone who had been arrested, I might add, 15 years ago and been in jail for 10 years — the idea that it was something new,” Biden told reporters in Philadelphia.
The President said he had spoken to the Attorney General and told him “that I wanted to make sure we got the word out to synagogues and places of worship that we’re not going to tolerate this, that we have this capacity to deal with the assaults on particularly the anti-Semitism that has grown up.”
“And so — and I’ll be talking with — I put a call into the rabbi. We missed one another on the way up here. And — but they should rest assured that we are focused. We are focused. The Attorney General is focused. I’m making sure that we deal with these kinds of acts,” stressed Biden.
Biden added that he does not yet have too much information about the gunman’s motivations and would get into that at a press conference on Wednesday.
Asked why the gunman targeted that specific synagogue, the President replied, “Well, no, I don’t. I don’t think there is sufficient information to know about why he targeted that synagogue or why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been in prison for over 10 years, why he was engaged — why he was using anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli comments. We just don’t have enough facts.”
Meanwhile on Sunday, the gunman who burst into the Dallas-area synagogue and held four people hostage for hours was identified as 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram, a citizen of the UK.
Akram’s name was released by the FBI after the British government confirmed that the gunman involved in Saturday’s hostage situation in Colleyville, Texas was a British national.