The man who stormed a Texas synagogue on the Sabbath and is holding hostages is the brother of a woman currently jailed on attempted murder charges after she was found with chemicals and plans to attack New York City landmarks in 2008.
The unknown assailant took the hostages at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville during religious services around 11.30am, which were being live-streamed, telling a SWAT team, 'If anyone tries to enter this building, I’m telling you… everyone will die.'
The live-stream cut off shortly before 2pm local time.
Before the livestream cut off, the unknown assailant can be heard saying, 'I'm going to die. Don't cry about me'
'Are you listening? I am going to die,' he repeated over and over.
The man is holding the rabbi and three other people hostage, Katersky said.
The suspect claims his sister is Aafia Siddiqui, a known terrorist who is incarcerated at Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth and he is demanding to have the sister freed, according to a source.
Siddiqui was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 by local forces who found her with two kilos of poison sodium cyanide and plans for chemical attacks on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.
The Al Qaeda operative dubbed ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ bragged to her student friends at the age of just 21 that she would be proud to be on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Aafia Siddiqui, the Al Qaeda operative dubbed ‘Lady Al Qaeda’, bragged to her student friends at the age of just 21 that she would be proud to be on the FBI’s Most Wanted list
Siddiqui currently resides at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Ft. Worth, formerly Carswell AFB in Texas
Authorities say a man alleging to be Siddiqui's brother has apparently taken hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue near Fort Worth, Texas
Emergency responders are seen near a synagogue where the man has reportedly taken people hostage and demanding his sister be freed at a synagogue during services that were being streamed live
Siddiqui, who was a biology major at MIT, said in 1993 that she wanted to do ‘something to help our Muslim brothers and sisters’ even if it meant breaking the law.
She jumped to her feet and ‘raised her skinny little wrists in the air’ in a display of defiance that shocked her friends.
An in-depth account of her journey to infamy also reveals that she took a National Rifle Association shooting class and persuaded other Muslims to learn how to fire a gun.
Siddiqui lied to her husband and after they wed over the phone he was stunned to discover she was just marrying him for his family’s connections to better enable her to wage jihad.
Siddiqui, 42, a mother-of-three, eventually got her twisted wish and became the most wanted woman in the world by the FBI.
She was handed to the Americans and convicted of attempted murder two years later in a U.S. court.
But her hatred for the U.S. was so strong that during her interrogation she grabbed a rifle from one of her guards and shot at them shouting: ‘Death to Americans’.
A 2014 Boston Globe profile of Siddiqui’s time in Boston sought to answer what happened during her 11 years as a student in the U.S.
Something happened to radicalize an intelligent and devout woman who not only graduated from MIT but also got a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University.
Siddiqui was sent by her neurosurgeon father from Pakistan to study in the U.S. on her own and won a partial scholarship to study at MIT in Cambridge, MA.
She arrived there in 1991 having been living with her brother in Texas, for a year where she studied at the University of Houston and gave regular speeches on Islam.
During one she told the crowd: ‘The hijab is not a restriction. It allows a woman to be judged by her content, not by her packaging, by what is written on the pages, not the pretty artwork on the cover’
At MIT she made few friends and was remembered as intelligent, driven and a regular at the Prospect Street mosque, which would later be attended by alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
She wore long sleeves and the hijab and was seen as ‘very sweet’ for a former roommate at her all-female dorm.
The focus of her life was the Muslim Student Association but things appear to have changed with
