Police tape hangs exterior the Temple Israel synagogue on March 13, 2026, in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan
| Picture Credit score: AP
The brother of a person who attacked a Michigan synagogue final week, who was killed earlier this month in an Israeli airstrike, was a Hezbollah commander, Israel’s navy claimed Sunday.
Ibrahim Ghazali was killed in Lebanon together with three different of the attacker’s family on March 5 — per week earlier than authorities allege Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove his automotive into a significant synagogue exterior Detroit and killed himself after safety fired at him.
The FBI’s Detroit workplace, which is investigating the assault, declined to touch upon the claims by Israel’s navy about Ibrahim Ghazali.
“Out of respect for the continuing investigation, we are going to proceed to chorus from commenting on its substance,” FBI spokesman Jordan Corridor mentioned in an electronic mail Sunday.
The AP was not instantly capable of confirm the declare that Ibrahim Ghazali was a militant.
The Israeli navy alleges Ibrahim Ghazali was a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons for a unit that fired rockets at Israel.
A Lebanese official, who requested anonymity as a result of he couldn’t publicly focus on particulars of the airstrike, has confirmed Ibrahim Ghazali’s loss of life, telling the AP that Ghazali’s kids, Ali and Fatima, and brother, Kassim, had been additionally killed within the strike that hit their house simply after sundown.
Authorities have mentioned that Ayman Ghazali, 41, carried out the synagogue assault after studying that 4 of his relations had been killed within the Israeli strike.
Israel has stepped up assaults on the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon because the battle with Iran has unfold violence throughout the Center East.
On Thursday, Ayman Ghazali waited in his automotive exterior Temple Israel, close to Detroit, for about two hours with a rifle, industrial grade fireworks and jugs of liquid believed to be gasoline, earlier than crashing into the constructing stuffed with dozens of kids, in line with authorities.
He began firing his gun by the windshield, exchanging fireplace with an armed safety guard. Ghazali fatally shot himself after he bought caught in his automobile and the engine caught fireplace, mentioned Jennifer Runyan, the particular agent answerable for the FBI’s Detroit subject workplace.
No staffers or kids contained in the synagogue had been damage, probably on account of beefed up safety in current months.
The FBI, which is main the investigation, described the assault on one of many nation’s largest Reform synagogues as an act of violence focusing on the Jewish group, however mentioned that they did not have sufficient proof but to name it an act of terror.
Ghazali got here to the US in 2011 on an instantaneous relative visa because the partner of a US citizen and was granted US citizenship in 2016, in line with the Division of Homeland Safety.
He lived in a single-story brick house within the Detroit suburb of Dearborn Heights about 61 kilometres south of the synagogue.
The assault on the Michigan synagogue passed off on the identical day as a former Military Nationwide Guard member who served years in jail for making an attempt to help the Islamic State opened fireplace on a classroom at Outdated Dominion College in Virginia, killing one individual and wounding two others.
Printed – March 16, 2026 02:37 am IST