The brother of the man who took hostages at a Texas synagogue is stunned his sibling was allowed to fly from England to the United States — because he was known to counterterrorism officials in Britain.
“He’s known to police. Got a criminal record. How was he allowed to get a visa and acquire a gun?” Malik Faisal Akram’s brother Gulbar Akram told Sky News on Monday.
The brother later told The New York Times that Akram, 44, was known to anti-terror cops in the UK but it wasn’t immediately clear why, and the detail couldn’t be independently confirmed.
Law-enforcement sources told The Post Akram was not named on any “no-fly lists” and The Guardian reported he had no known terrorism convictions.
The extent of Akram’s criminal history wasn’t immediately available, but his brother said he’d previously been arrested in the 1990s when he was 19 for wielding a baseball bat during a domestic dispute with his cousins, the Times reported, adding he was sent to a young offenders’ institute and was later given a six-month prison sentence for the crime.
Few details of Akram’s time in the US have emerged since he took four people hostage at the Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, Saturday, while demanding the release of Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, but law-enforcement sources confirmed to The Post he first arrived on Dec. 29 at Kennedy Airport.
He listed a hotel on Queens Boulevard as his destination on his travel documents, but only stayed in the Big Apple for two days before boarding another flight to Texas on Dec. 31, a law-enforcement source said.
Over the weekend, President Biden said Akram “apparently” spent his first night in the US at a “homeless shelter” and purchased the gun he used during the attack “on the street” but couldn’t provide further details.
Law-enforcement sources in New York said Akram couldn’t have purchased the gun in the Big Apple because he boarded a flight two days later to Texas and said it’s more likely he procured the weapon after he arrived in the Dallas area.
“Nobody has any idea where he got the gun and our number one substantive witness is dead, but it seems more likely that he got it in Texas,” a police official explained.
Gulbar Akram told the Times his brother was deeply troubled, had grown apart from his relatives in recent years and had long struggled with mental-health issues.
“It’s well known, everybody in the town knows, he has mental health issues,” he said.
“How had he gotten into America?” he questioned.
“Why was he granted a visa? How did he land at JFK Airport and not get stopped for one second?”
Akram said his brother’s mental-health issues worsened when another sibling died from COVID-19 about three months ago, but the terrorist had long struggled with behavioral issues.
It emerged Monday that a UK courthouse gave Akram a rare “Exclusion Order” that banned him from entering the facility because he berated staff on the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, The Telegraph reported.
He told an usher at Blackburn’s magistrates’ court that he wished the court official had been killed on one of the planes that slammed into the Twin Towers and a senior court clerk at the facility described Akram as a “menace,” the outlet said.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona
