Police Name Manchester Victims, Attacker

Police on Friday identified the two men who were killed in a car and knife attack on a synagogue in northwest England on the holiest day of the Jewish year, as Britain's chief rabbi said an "unrelenting wave" of antisemitism lay behind the crime. Greater Manchester Police said local residents Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, died in the attack on the Heaton Park Congregation Synagogue in the Manchester suburb of Crumpsall, the AP reports. Three other people are hospitalized in serious condition.

• The attacker was identified by police as Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent who entered the United Kingdom as a young child and became a citizen in 2006. Authorities are unsure whether that is his birth name, since Al-Shamie translates into English as "the Syrian."

• Police shot and killed the attacker seven minutes after he rammed a car into pedestrians outside the synagogue on Thursday morning and then attacked them with a knife. He wore what appeared to be an explosives belt, which was found to be fake.
• The assault took place as people gathered at the Orthodox synagogue on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the head of Orthodox Judaism in Britain, said the attack was the result of "an unrelenting wave of Jew hatred" on the streets and online. "This is the day we hoped we would never see, but which deep down, we knew would come," he wrote on social media.
• Police said the crime is being investigated as a terrorist attack. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the attacker was not previously known to police or to Prevent, a national counterterror program that tries to identify people at risk of radicalization.
• Police said they are still probing the attacker's motive. Officers arrested three people Thursday on suspicion of the preparation or commission of acts of terrorism. They are two men in their 30s and a woman in her 60s. Mahmood said was "too early to say" whether a terrorist cell was involved, the Telegraph reports.

• Mahmood urged pro-Palestine protesters not to hold demonstrations in the coming days, the Manchester Evening News reports. "As far as I am concerned, I would have wanted to see people in this country step back from protesting for at least a few days, just to give the Jewish community here a chance to process what has happened and to begin the grieving process as well," she said. "I am very disappointed that some of the organizers haven't heeded the call to step back."
• Mahmood said 40 people were arrested on Thursday evening at protests that were unrelated to the synagogue attack and were organized in response to the Israeli navy's interception of a flotilla attempting to break Israel's blockade of Gaza.