A driver who rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in Michigan on Thursday afternoon is dead, officials say.
Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard told reporters that the suspect had driven his vehicle through the doors of Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield and then down a hallway before it caught fire.
Security guards at the synagogue opened fire as he approached and then confronted him inside. One who had been hit by the vehicle was being treated at hospital and was expected to recover, authorities said.
The FBI said the incident was being investigated as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community”.
The US Department of Homeland Security identified the suspect as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalised US citizen who was born in Lebanon and came to the US in 2011.
Thirty police officers were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation as the synagogue became “engulfed” in flames, the Oakland County sheriff said. He added that the investigation would uncover what had ignited the fire.
Temple Israel – one of the largest reform Jewish synagogues in the US – also has a preschool from where dozens of children had to be evacuated during the incident.
FBI special agent Jennifer Runyan said the incident was “deeply, disturbing and tragic”.
Bouchard called the crime a “hateful, terrible thing” but did not elaborate on a specific motive.
“We know there’s evil in the world,” Bouchard told a news conference on Thursday evening. “When they show up, that’s where training and preparation come in.”
At an earlier briefing, Bouchard said “everything that was supposed to happen, happened”, adding: “Security did their job, and then the responders did theirs.”
Police did not say how the suspect had died. Bouchard said it was difficult to determine the suspect’s cause of death because the vehicle caught fire.
“We can’t say what killed him at this point,” he said. “But security did engage the suspect with gunfire.”
Officers were working to clear the vehicle “out of an abundance of caution” in case there were explosives, he added.
State and local law enforcement, as well as the FBI, all responded to the emergency.
US President Donald Trump told an event at the White House on Thursday that he wanted to “send our love to the Michigan Jewish community and all of the people in Detroit”.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said.
Lisa Stern, a member of Temple Israel for more than 20 years, drove to the synagogue after she heard news that there had been an attack, concerned about her friends inside, who included two rabbis and a social worker.
But she said she chose not to text them to see if they were safe, as a pinging sound might have given their locations away. Initially, the ramming was reported as an “active shooter incident”.
Waiting across the street, Stern said she saw anxious parents and grandparents arriving to make sure their children were safe.
“At first, when they didn’t know, the parents were like falling to the ground,” she said. “Thankfully it was minutes until they said the kids were safe.”
Students were evacuated and taken to a nearby country club, Temple Israel said in a statement on Facebook. The school’s 140 students as well as “our amazing staff, our courageous teachers, and our heroic security personnel” were all accounted for and safe, it said.
Stern added that she believed the suspect had knowledge about the synagogue, which is not visible from the road.
“They obviously knew where they were going because they knew where to do maximum damage.”
Stern said the synagogue had always had guards and had ramped up security since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, after which there was a rise of antisemitism in the US.
There are concerns of renewed attacks targeting Jewish people due to the current US-Israeli operation against Iran.
Family members of the suspect in Thursday’s attack had been killed in the fighting, the mayor of the nearby city of Dearborn said.
“Earlier this month, he lost several members of his own family, including his niece and nephew, in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon,” Mo Baydoun said in a statement.
Over the last two weeks, law enforcement has been in regular contact with the synagogue and other houses of worship in the area, Bouchard said.
On Thursday afternoon, Jewish congregations and organisations in the state took extra security measures and the Michigan State Police patrolled other Jewish sites. Meanwhile, major cities across the US increased their police presence at Jewish centres.
Temple Israel was founded in 1941 and has about 3,500 families who are members, or about 12,000 congregants.
West Bloomfield is one of several suburbs surrounding Detroit, Michigan that are home to a large Jewish population.
About 71,000 Jewish people in total reside in the area, according to the most recent survey from the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, comprising the vast majority of Michigan’s Jewish population.
The vehicle ramming rattled local members of the community, Stern said. Many have been on higher alert in recent years as incidences of antisemitism increase across the country.
“This was a matter of when, not if,” Stern said she told someone while waiting across the street from the synagogue on Thursday afternoon.
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