House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is demanding President Joe Biden's White House answer how a UK national with a criminal history was allowed to fly to the United States where he held four people hostage at a synagogue in Texas over the weekend. In addition to condemning the attack, he and other national Republican figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have been grilling the administration over its handling of the incident. Many accused the president of directing more federal law enforcement resources toward American parents protesting Critical Race Theory and mask mandates in public schools. There is growing outrage and demand for answers as to how the British terrorist gunman who took four hostages at a synagogue in Colleyville on Saturday was even able to enter the US on a tourist visa when he was known to intelligence agencies in the UK. The FBI has declined to comment on the matter. Malik Faisal Akram, 44, flew to New York City from the UK on January 22, despite being known to MI5 and having a criminal record. 'Over the past 48 hours, President Biden’s Justice Department has gone from denying the clear and religious, anti-Semitic implications of this attack to now backtracking to what we all already knew to be true. Now as more information becomes available, it only raises more questions,' McCarthy said in a statement first sent to DailyMail.com. The top Republican in the House of Representatives said the information coming out of Biden' Justice Department about the Texas synagogue crisis raises 'more questions' The top GOP lawmaker in the House of Representatives accused Biden officials of 'downplaying' the attack and demanded to know why the FBI 'initially disregard[ed] the role anti-Semitism played in this hostage situation.' 'How was it that someone with an apparent criminal record and suspicious travel history was allowed into the United States to begin with?' he also questioned. 'What national security concerns remain?' DeSantis' spokeswoman told DailyMail.com, 'Governor DeSantis condemns antisemitism in the strongest possible terms. 'The terrorist was clearly driven by antisemitic hate, which is why he targeted the synagogue, and it is appalling that the initial statement from the FBI as reported by corporate media initially obfuscated that fact,' spokeswoman Christina Pushaw said. 'While we do not have the details of how this UK national with a criminal record was able to go to Texas and attack the synagogue, this is exactly the kind of national security threat that the FBI ought to prevent. But instead, the Biden Administration is weaponizing the FBI against political dissidents, such as concerned parents making their voices heard at school board meetings.' Malik Faisal Akram, 44, flew to New York City from the UK on January 22, despite being known to MI5 GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell of New Mexico told DailyMail.com it was 'deeply disturbing' that Akram was able to enter the United States. 'It is deeply disturbing that the Beth Israel synagogue terrorist was able to come to this country with a criminal record, by some accounts on a federal watch list, and be able to attack a Jewish place of worship with the goal of freeing another terrorist,' Herrell said. 'The situation becomes even more alarming when President Biden pretends to be unaware of the gunman’s motives and unclear about the details of the case. 'The Biden administration seems more concerned with calling parents at PTA “domestic terrorists” than actually catching and stopping real criminals.' Texas Senator Ted Cruz said the details so-far known of the attack were 'highly concerning.' He told DailyMail.com: 'A full investigation must be completed, any anyone else found to have been involved in this attack or otherwise engaged in illegal activity should be brought to justice.' Akram's family say he had a criminal history but somehow, he was able to get an ESTA tourist visa - which are supposed to be off-limits to foreigners who have broken the law. Akram spent two weeks at a homeless shelter in Dallas, during which time he was able to buy a gun on the street. Police are piecing together the terrorist's final movements after arriving at JFK airport by January 2 before staying in a homeless hostel run by a Christian charity before launching the attack on January 15 There is growing fury and intrigue over how the gunman was even able to enter the US when he was known to British authorities, and had to apply to US Customs and Border Protection for a visa On Saturday, he arrived at Beth Israel Congregation in the morning and knocked on the window. He was welcomed inside by the rabbi, had a cup of tea with him, and then raided services at 11am while the congregation was praying. The standoff lasted nearly 12 hours before he was shot dead by a SWAT team. None of the hostages were hurt. 'How long did the FBI know a radical Islamist foreign national with a criminal record was in the country? Were they working with him or his associates? 'How did this person get a visa? Did he slip through the cracks because they were too busy surveilling your conservative grandma?' Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. 'They don’t want us to talk about how a known jihadist got past the FBI and into the country, obtained an illegal firearm, and took hostages at a synagogue,' Jasec Posobiec said. Stephen Miller, Trump's former adviser, tweeted that 'every journalist' should be asking whether Biden changing vetting laws for tourists contributed to the incident. Officers are seen surrounding the building in Texas on Saturday Who is Aafia Siddiqui, the 'Lady Al Qaeda' terrorist who planned chemical attacks on Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge 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. Two handout photos of terror suspect Aafia Siddiqui released by the FBI in May of 2004 She 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 Siddiqui, 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 in a U.S. court in 2010. 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. 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 the start of the Bosnian War, which seems to have been the beginning of her radicalization. Siddiqui became involved with the Al-Kifah Refugee Centre, a Brooklyn-based organization which is thought to have been Al Qaeda's focus of operations in the US. Terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann said: 'Aafia was from a prominent family with connections and a sympathy for jihad. She was just what they needed.' In 1993 as she and some friends debated how to raise money for Muslims being killed during the Bosnian War, one of them joked that they didn't want to go on the FBI's Most Wanted List. Waqas Jilani, then a graduate student at Clark University, said: 'She raised her skinny little wrists in the air and said: 'I'd be proud to be on the Most Wanted list because it would mean I'm doing something to help our Muslim brothers and sisters' 'She said we should all be proud to be on that list'. Jilani added that Siddiqui said in her speeches that Muslims should 'get training and go overseas and fight'. He said: 'We were all laughing like, 'Uh-oh, Aafia's got a gun!' 'Part of it was because she was such a bad shot, but also because she was always mouthing off about the U.S. and the FBI being so bad and all.' Siddiqui married Mohammed Amjad Khan, the son of a wealthy Pakistani family, in a ceremony carried out over the phone before he flew to Boston. But upon arrival he discovered that far from being the quiet religious woman he had been promised, her life was very different. He said: 'I discovered that the well-being of our nascent family unit was not her prime goal in life. Instead, it was to gain prominence in Muslim circles.' Khan described to the Boston Globe how she regularly watched videos of Osama bin Laden, spent weekends at terror training camps in New Hampshire with activists from Al-Kifah and begged him to quit his medical job so he could join her. In the end he stopped bringing work colleagues home because she would 'only to talk about them converting to Islam'. Khan said: 'Invariably this would lead to unpleasantness, so I decided to keep my work separate.... '...By now, all her focus had shifted to jihad against America, instead of preaching to Americans so that they all become Muslims and America becomes a Muslim land'. The breaking point was the September 11 2001 attacks after which Siddiqui, who was by now dressing in all black, insisted they return to Pakistan and got a divorce. American officials suspect she remarried Ammar Al-Baluchi, the nephew of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, though her family deny this. Siddiqui and her children disappeared in Karachi, Pakistan in 2003 shortly after Mohammed was arrested. The following year she was named by FBI director Robert Mueller as one of the seven most wanted Al Qaeda operatives, and the only woman. Advertisement The Independent reports that Akram was known to MI5 but that they didn't consider him a severe threat. It's unclear what he said in his application for an ESTA tourist visa, which asks whether or not applicants have a criminal record. The ESTA website claims checks will be carried out to see if an applicant has any undisclosed criminal convictions on file. But according to social justice charity Nacro, the US authorities do not have access to criminal records held on the UK's Police National Computer. There was equal outrage in the UK, where lawmakers demanded to know how he was able to by-pass America's immigration rules, which are known to be some of the strictest in the world. Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline there seemed to have been a 'dreadful' error at the UK and US borders caused by an 'intelligence failure' and it needed to be looked at. 'This is clearly a failure of intelligence sharing. It is absolutely dreadful that he has been allowed to go to the States and hurt people. 'Clearly something has gone wrong somewhere,' he said. Another senior MP with knowledge of the security services voiced surprise that the background had not been picked up. 'How did he get into the US?' they said. 'You get picked up for walking on the cracks in the pavement.' Yesterday, his brother, Gulbar, demanded how he was allowed into America despite a long criminal record. He said Malik was mentally ill and was mourning the death of his brother three months ago, reportedly from Covid. The extent of his criminal record is not yet clear, but it may be that some of his offences may have been too petty or too old to stop him being turned away from the United States' border. 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