Jihad Al-Shamie’s reign of terror at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue lasted a mere eight minutes. But the roots of last week’s frenzied attack almost certainly stretch back years.

Police, who shot Al-Shamie dead, arrested six suspects after raiding two homes on the night of the incident, in which two worshippers were killed and another four seriously injured. Officers continue to interview four of them.

Detectives must establish how the outwardly normal Syrian immigrant, who was granted British citizenship at the age of 16, turned into a bloodthirsty extremist capable of dressing up as a suicide bomber, in a fake explosive belt and attacking innocent worshippers who were celebrating Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Given what we now know about the 35-year-old killer, they must also get to the bottom of what prevented him being spotted earlier. For the more we learn about his radicalisation, the more this looks like a tragedy that was waiting to happen.

CHILDHOOD INJURY

Al-Shamie is the eldest son of Faraj and Formosa Al-Shamie, who left their native Syria in the early 1990s and moved to the UK.

Faraj, a 64-year-old surgeon, took a job at North Manchester General Hospital. The family, including Al-Shamie’s younger brothers Jawad and Kenan, moved into a home in nearby Delaunays Road.

Home videos on Faraj’s YouTube account depict a normal 1990s childhood, involving trips to Chester Zoo and the Camelot theme park. One, recorded for a grandfather in Syria, shows Al-Shamie cuddling a cat in the back garden, while in another he pushes six-year-old Jawad on a garden swing as four-year-old Kenan plays with a toy gun.

The family wasn’t particularly religious, according to neighbours, and camcorder footage shows the boys starring in nativity plays at the local primary school.

Later, at Crumpsall High School, Al-Shamie’s academic career was unexceptional. Around the age of 15, he received a head injury after a serious fall during a foreign holiday, but returned to school after a period of treatment.

A former teacher described him as ‘strange’ and ‘weird’, with occasional disciplinary issues, but he doesn’t appear to have displayed any signs of extremism.

SKUNK-SMOKING UNIVERSITY DROPOUT

As a teenager, Al-Shamie developed two main hobbies: Playing violent video games and smoking skunk – strong marijuana.

In fact, he’d begun his obsession with gaming during his primary school years, with neighbours describing him playing on a console outside for so long that his eyes would be ‘twitching’.

In his teens, friends claim he spent hours each day in his bedroom, smoking skunk and honing his skills on Street Fighter, an arcade-style beat-’em-up game.

YouTube footage from August 2010 shows Al-Shamie competing at a European Console League event in Liverpool.

The following year, he enrolled at Liverpool John Moores University on an undergraduate course to study English, media and cultural studies.

However, after a year he quit.

Friends from the period say he barely attended lectures and instead spent most of his waking hours in his pyjamas ‘smoking weed, working out and playing video games’.

He moved back in with his parents shortly afterwards.

HAMAS-SUPPORTING DAD AND BROTHERS?

Around the time Al-Shamie quit university, his parents’ marriage fell apart. Faraj left his hospital job for swashbuckling career opportunities abroad, working for the Red Cross and other non-governmental organisations in crisis zones such as Afghanistan, South Sudan and Mali.

From time to time he would visit the family home in a car bearing French number plates, and these days is thought to reside in a small town between Paris and Calais with a new spouse, Limar.

On Facebook, Faraj responded to last week’s tragedy by expressing ‘shock and sorrow’ and saying that he wished to ‘fully distance’ himself from his son’s extremist behaviour.

One post stated: ‘The Al-Shamie family in the UK and abroad strongly condemns this heinous act, which targeted peaceful, innocent civilians.’

However, the same social media account has for years spread highly questionable material about Israel. In 2012, he described the country as an ‘arch-enemy’, dubbing it ‘the head of the snake and the source of destruction, division and injustice in our countries’. In 2015, he expressed support for Hamas, a proscribed terror organisation since 2001, saying its fighters in the Syrian civil war were displaying ‘spirit, determination, faith and steadfastness’.

Following the October 7 attacks, in which an estimated 1,200 Israeli civilians were murdered, Faraj praised the terrorists as ‘God’s men on earth’ saying ‘men like these prove they are Allah’s men on earth’, and that their operation ‘proved beyond doubt that Israel will not remain’.

Al-Shamie’s brother Kenan, a maths graduate who works for IBM, has also posted provocative content on Facebook during the Gaza crisis. In December he wrote in Arabic: ‘Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. I ask Allah Almighty to protect Al-Sham country [an area including Israel and Palestine] from the evil of aggressors.’

PROFESSIONAL WASTER

Unlike his high-flying brothers – his other sibling, Jawad, has an MA from the University of Kent and works as a pharmacist – there is no record of Al-Shamie holding down a steady job after he quit university.

Instead, he spent the best part of a decade at his mother Formosa’s semi-detached council home in Prestwich, Greater Manchester.

It’s unclear how he supported himself financially, or whether he claimed benefits. However at one point in the 2010s Al-Shamie’s name appeared on the register of a Manchester-based tutoring agency that offered English language lessons to overseas students. He’s also believed to have taken sporadic work as a computer programmer.

Prior to 2020, the majority of his time appears to have been devoted to video games, cannabis consumption and working out in the garden, where he’d lift weights in pyjamas and flip-flops.

But during the pandemic, neighbours noticed a significant lifestyle shift. ‘All of a sudden lockdown happened, and he started rocking up in his robes, which is fine, but it wasn’t his way,’ one told reporters this week. ‘They weren’t practising Muslims, the family. The kids were allowed to do what they wanted. And we got really worried, my partner and I, because [after lockdown] they weren’t even making eye contact with us.’

Another resident of the cul-de-sac had meanwhile complained that Al-Shamie kept approaching her two Afghan foster children and attempting to start conversations about Islam.

‘I reported it, because he was apparently preaching to two kids in the street as well as about the Koran,’ continued the neighbour. ‘Just weird things. So I reported the house [to police]… I dialled 999.’

It’s unclear whether Al-Shamie was named in the complaint, however. Police insists he was ‘not known to counter-terrorism’.

BIGAMIST

The newly devout Al-Shamie met Ikra Sulehman, a young woman from the Burnage area of South Manchester, during the lockdown era and moved into her family’s red-brick semi-detached home in early 2022.

They swiftly married in an Islamic ceremony and had three children – Nul, Essa and Adam – over the ensuing three years.

On birth certificates, Al-Shamie gave his occupation as ‘full-time father’. He certainly wasn’t much of a breadwinner. Insolvency records show that last September the ‘unemployed’ Al-Shamie became subject to a debt-relief order. Despite taking a job as a call-handler with the RAC a few months later, he was back on the dole by Easter.

By then, a second wife had appeared on the scene, in the unorthodox shape of Elizabeth Davis, a 35-year-old NHS worker from Bolton, who has five children from previous relationships.

Al-Shamie appears to have met Davis, a Muslim convert, last autumn, and their bigamous marriage was formalised in a secret Islamic ceremony two days later. But it doesn’t appear to have lasted. At the time of the synagogue attack, Davis was co-habiting with a 43-year-old Asian man and his 18-year-old daughter.

Jihad was meanwhile living with his mother again, having apparently separated from (but not divorced) both spouses.

VIOLENT DATING APP PREDATOR

Two wives weren’t enough for Al-Shamie, who became an obsessive user of Muslim dating apps, adopting fake names such as ‘Valentino’ and ‘Ahmed’ to message eligible girls.

‘I once noticed on his phone that he had several notifications from dating apps, which confused me because I knew he was married,’ was how a friend put it in an interview with Sky News this week.

One girlfriend, whom he met over the Muzmatch app, recalled how she was 18 when they first met and was subsequently ‘groomed into a controlling relationship’ that lasted four months.

Al-Shamie lied about his age, saying he was just 24 when he was really in his thirties, and arranged secret trysts at a Premier Inn near his home because he didn’t want her ‘around his family’.

The woman told the Manchester Evening News how he cheated on her with other girls he met online, saying: ‘There were times when he would send me videos of him with other girls, and the girls were quite young.’

After the relationship came to an end, he began turning up at her home and workplace. Things quickly became abusive. On one occasion, he locked her in his car and ‘started spouting off horrible stuff, telling me that he could kill me with his bare hands, right here right now and that nobody would know the difference.’

He then pulled the woman’s hair. It was only the intervention of a friend, who threatened to call the police, that persuaded him to free her.

RAPE CLAIMS

The ex-girlfriend, who now lives overseas, says that following their split, Al-Shamie frequently messaged her with ‘rape fantasies’ and abusive messages, including one that said: ‘We had a good year or so. I enjoyed destroying you hundreds of times. In your prime.’

She also alleged that he physically assaulted her during their four-month fling.

Police have meanwhile revealed that he was on bail accused of raping a different woman when he carried out last week’s attack.

That affair revolves around an incident that led to him being arrested earlier this year. Sources say he already had a criminal record for other, less serious offences, some of which involved his treatment of women. But police insist he was not on the radar of counter-terror police or security services until Thursday.

THE SLIDE INTO EXTREMISM 

Al-Shamie’s growing misogyny began to manifest itself in his attitude towards the women in his life, whom he began pressurising to wear traditional dress.

The former mistress has said that in private he began pushing extremist views on her, at one point suggesting that he was interested in joining the terror organisation Isis.

That dovetails with the memory of two friends who spoke with Sky News this week. One, Qas, said Al-Shamie ‘started using [the encrypted messaging app] Telegram and searching for Isis videos’, adding: ‘Once, he even tried to show me one at the shisha lounge.

‘I told him to go away and asked how he even got access to that content, and he said it was through Telegram.

‘After that, I didn’t see him for a long time until I heard what had happened.’

Another friend, Asim, whom he’d met via a shared interest in computers, said he noticed a difference in Al-Shamie a year ago, explaining how he ‘changed a bit, I felt his thoughts were a bit too radical for me.’

MP ‘DEATH THREAT’ 

Friends first became concerned that in the last couple of years Al-Shamie had begun living up to his first name, Jihad – which can mean ‘striving’ or ‘doing one’s utmost’, but is often used to describe a ‘struggle or fight against the enemies of Islam’.

But police are also investigating whether he was responsible for sending a death threat to Tory politician John Howell in 2012. In an email, someone calling themselves ‘Jihad Alshamie’ had told the then MP for Henley, who is a supporter of Israel: ‘It is people like you who deserve to die.’

Mr Howell, who stood down from Parliament last year, said that while he didn’t yet know whether Al-Shamie was the author of the message, he didn’t feel police took the threat seriously at the time.

Additional reporting: James Tozer