The gunman who took four people hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, this past Shabbat, told his brother in a phone call before being shot dead by security forces, "I'm opening the doors for every youngster in England to enter America and f*** with them”.
The recording of the conversation between the gunman, Malik Faisal Akram, and his brother, was published on Thursday by UK-based JewishChronicle, which obtained the recording from a security source.
The brother, Gulbar, was speaking from a police station in the British town of Blackburn, in an attempt to persuade Akram to surrender.
“Live your f***ing life bro, you f***ing coward. We’re coming to f***ing America. F*** them if they want to f*** with us. We’ll give them f***ing war,” he said in the conversation, in which he also boasted about his desire for martyrdom. "I've asked Allah for this death, Allah is with me, I'm not worried in the slightest,” raged the gunman, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
In a semi-coherent ramble about American conflicts overseas, the terrorist said, “Why do these f***ing motherf***ers come to our countries, rape our women and f*** our kids? I'm setting a precedent… maybe they'll have compassion for f***ing Jews.”
When urged by his brother to end the siege, do time in prison and come back to his family, Akram shouted that he had been “praying to Allah for two years for this” and made clear he intended to die.
"I'm going to go toe-to-toe with [police] and they can shoot me dead … I’m coming home in a body bag,” he declared.
Akram also told his brother he was pleased with the attention he had attracted to the cause of Muslims who were, in his view, oppressed by the US.
“I’m bombed up, I've got f****ng every ammunition,” he said. He then raged about the Taliban and the United States’ foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. American forces had occupied Afghanistan but the Taliban were unable to travel to the US to take their revenge, he said.
The audio ends shortly before the hostages ran out of the synagogue and Akram was shot dead by an FBI SWAT team. His final words were: “I’m going.”
Jeffrey Cohen, one of the hostages, told MSNBC this week that Akram was not "your typical attacker" who wanted to kill Jewish people but that he had "bought into these tropes."
"He came to the Jews because he bought into these very dangerous stories that the Jews control the world and the Jews control the government and the banks and the media. And we as good people and we as patriotic Americans, we need to challenge those things when we hear them, because these words do have consequences," Cohen recalled.
The rabbi of Congregation Beth El, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, on Monday publicly described for the first time the moment he and the other hostages escaped.
“The last hour or so of the standoff, he wasn’t getting what he wanted,” Cytron-Walker told CBS. “It didn’t look good. It didn’t sound good. We were very, we were terrified.
“And when I saw an opportunity where he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were still with me that they were ready to go. The exit wasn’t too far away. I told them to go, I threw a chair at the gunman and I headed for the door. And all three of us were able to get out without even a shot being fired.”
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