A terrorist attack on Yom Kippur

0:02Andy Hughes:This is a Global Player original podcast. The attack in Manchester this morning is absolutely shocking and all of our thoughts are with those affected. I'm on my way back to London. When I arrive, I will chair an emergency COBRA meeting. I'm already able to say that additional police assets are being deployed to synagogues across the country and we will do everything to keep our Jewish community safe.

0:27Jon Sopel:That is Keir Starmer at the airport in Copenhagen, cutting short his visit with EU leaders to return after an attack on a synagogue that has left two people dead, three people seriously injured and the attacker shot by the police.

0:44David Yelland:The attack still feels very new. There's a lot we have yet to learn. But we're going to try and reflect today on what it means politically and also what it means personally. the holiest day of the Jewish year. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:05Jon Sopel:The News Agents. It's John.

1:08David Yelland:It's Emily.

1:08Jon Sopel:And today's episode is going to sound not like our normal episodes, I suspect, because, you know, we are recording this as we are finding out details of what looks like a terrorist attack on a synagogue in North Manchester on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur and two people have been killed and the attacker has also been shot and killed we think by the police I say we think because they cannot approach the body because there's worry that he has a suicide vest on him I should say it's about 20 past one now so obviously more and more details are coming through of what feels like the first terrorist attack in years in this country and also I'm trying to remember when there has been a fatal attack on a synagogue or a mosque or a church in this country which does mark a kind of new and depressing low I suppose.

2:11David Yelland:Yeah I mean I think it's pretty shaky it's a pretty shaky time for a lot of people in the Jewish community this is Yom Kippur it's an incredibly solemn moving day it's a day of reflection of fasting a lot of people won't be working and will have turned off their phones and their tv set they might not even know about this as the events are unfolding and they started unfolding very early this morning at 9 31 when the police received reports of a car that was being driven towards members of the public outside heaton park synagogue in manchester as you say and extraordinarily the Greater Manchester Police were on the scene within six minutes.

2:56David Yelland:Now that's probably not a coincidence because most synagogues now have security around them. They have a sort of community, often a volunteer body, of people who will stand there checking bags, sometimes checking tickets or checking members. They will tell you not to congregate in or around these places of worship And they have very good community liaison with the local police. And police will also be on their guard and patrolling in areas that are quite often within a stone's throw of the synagogue. So I guess this tells you that there has long been a heightened sense of fear about what could happen on the high holy days on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

3:44And I have to say, I've sort of come to this with quite a lot of emotional baggage.

3:50David Yelland:I was in synagogue last night in London. And I mean, it was an incredible occasion, sort of joyous and full and full of light. But I looked around, there must have been sort of 300 people in there. And I thought what I always think, which is like, oh, my God, how dare we all sit together? Aren't we a target? Aren't we asking for it? Because we're all together, you know, and you shouldn't have those thoughts when you just walk into a building to pray, you know, to think, to reflect. And yet I was full of that sense, you know, of what a privilege it feels to be able just to kind of gather, you know, with people of your own religion and...

4:33Jon Sopel:And worship freely.

4:35David Yelland:And worship and be quiet. And so, yeah, I mean, I left at about half past nine, quarter to ten last night. And and then we woke up to this this morning and there is that sense of like, well, it wasn't last night. Of course, it was today. It wasn't Rosh Hashanah. It was Yom Kippur. And I think I think there are many British Jews, many Jews around the world who have felt an increasing sense of the temperature. And I want to divide that very firmly from any of the politics, anything that's going on in Israel, anything that's going on within the Israeli government and its actions, which, you know, a lot of people have been very happy, quick to condemn and say this is this is not about politics.

5:28David Yelland:This is about being allowed to go to a place of worship on a day that's very important to people. And actually, the time of day where people were going, that there was a service sometimes at the beginning, sometimes at the end called Yitzchol, which is when you go to remember members of your family that you've lost. You know, it's a special prayer. And you go and you sit. Sometimes you give their names at the front and their names are recited. And it's a kind of extra grieving. It's a mourning period where you say, these are the people we've lost during the last year. I'm thinking about those people.

6:00David Yelland:And you sort of come to it with a sense of love and memory and grief. And the timing just seems sort of, yeah, to have really sliced through that sense of important reflection.

6:14Jon Sopel:Look, you and I went to synagogue together just after October the 7th, when a lot of the Jewish community around the UK, around the world came together. after this horrific event in Israel where 1 ,200 people lost their lives and hundreds were taken hostage. And that was a very profound, shocking moment. But there was also the sense of increased vulnerability. You know, I was up in Liverpool this week at the Labour Party conference and we're talking about Islamophobia, which is also real. And there is absolute fear in the Muslim community about what might happen and the way that they feel that they're being vilified and that they feel more vulnerable to attack.

6:55Jon Sopel:And it is just the same. They nearly always go hand in hand.

6:59David Yelland:They always go hand in hand. I mean, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin.

7:03Jon Sopel:And so I think that the Jewish community have, I think it's slightly part of our culture that we catastrophize and think that something terrible is coming because go back over, you know, two or three thousand years of Jewish history, catastrophic events have happened. And I've always thought, oh, come on, let's not catastrophize. actually we're all getting along yeah it's tougher but life goes on and today we've had an attack a terrorist attack on people going to worship those people in that synagogue at heaton park are not responsible for israeli foreign policy they are not responsible for netanyahu and the attacks that are taking place on gaza causing so much misery and suffering and hardship to palestinians they are just Jews who are worshipping.

7:49Jon Sopel:And likewise, Muslims who go to the mosque to pray on Friday prayers are not responsible for what some crazy jihadist might do anywhere else in the world. And I really wish we could separate those two things and be able to separate the thoughts. But of course, if you're an extremist, you want to sow distrust. You want to sow that anger in communities that makes matters worse.

8:14David Yelland:As you said, this probably doesn't sound like a normal News Agents episode. We've got personnel quite quickly, but I think it's important to try and take you through some of the stages and try and make sense of what we know so far, limited. And we're going to talk now to Andy Hughes, who is host of the Crime Agents podcast and also LBC's crime correspondent. Andy, just talk us through the method used because it felt quite shocking. It felt like something genuinely that we haven't seen here, thank God, for years.

8:47Andy Hughes:Yeah, exactly. Knives and cars. This has been the methodology since the mid-2010s, really. It's the emergence of ISIS. And they told people in foreign countries to do whatever you can and attack in any way you can. So it changed from, you know, these massively sophisticated suicide bombers in 7-7 back in 2005. and it then changed to knives and cars and this is what we've seen and this is also an absolute nightmare for the security services because in every kitchen there are knives and everyone has

9:23Jon Sopel:a car so i guess the question that people will want to know the answer to the police the security services is this a lone wolf or what is this prestige well that's the number one priority

9:33Andy Hughes:to find out if this is a lone actor or if he has associations the first thing they will bottom out his identity is he known to the security services if he is who are his associates and tracking them down as soon as possible that's the number one priority after that it then you know it becomes way more complicated after that in terms of who do you go after if he is linked and then analysis of devices and gathering more intelligence like that andy can we talk about the item he had around

10:06David Yelland:his waist because it is not an obvious suicide vest of the kind that you know we we've sort of seen in the past in a weird way it looks very similar to what a lot of jewish men would have been wearing today which is the sort of the bit that carries the prayer shawl so you you wouldn't have instantly seen that and thought this is somebody who's wearing a suicide vest this is

10:28Andy Hughes:where it becomes really complicated i saw the images as we all have now and the suspicious thing about this outfit is there are a couple of white pouches below now this is what suicide vests would look like but you're right the top half it's difficult to understand what i do know is that we've seen footage of police officers talking to each other and shouting at each other while they're confronting the man at the scene they're saying he's got a device he's got a device he's trying to push the button he's trying to push the button and it was at that point where you heard shots that's why they fire they shoot to kill they're trying to shoot to kill so what would have happened is they would have had a description of this man the firearms officers on their way because of the threat and the fact that he's trying to get into a synagogue the fact that he's wearing what could be a suicide vest then they would have been ordered to shoot to kill and it would have been up to the officers on the ground to make that decision we were working out

11:27David Yelland:the time frame between the first stabbing the first car and the arrival of the police it was incredibly fast and it was recognized it was an absolutely extraordinary seven minutes is that because of the way that the communities around the synagogues now work with the police i mean everyone is on heightened attack on yom kippur i mean do you think there was any kind of tip-off or

11:50Andy Hughes:i'm assuming that there was a sense of that so security would have been heightened anyway what does happen and this will happen on any day never mind a day like this is firearms officers they are just dispatched across the cities and they are just circling waiting for a call like what happened today to come in the suggestion is that they were just around the corner when they got that call and this is why they responded so fast that plus the heightened security that i'm assuming is why

12:21Jon Sopel:there was such a quick response yeah and then we get to threat level since october the 7th and the kind of heightened sense of tension that there has been people have spoken about the dangers and the threats and you know islamophobia and anti-semitism and it's been very much in the headlines do you think that they will the security services reflect that the threat level wasn't high enough does it

12:44Andy Hughes:change now what will be the considerations there so that's what will be decided at the cobra meeting At the moment, it is substantial, which means an attack is likely. That could then be raised to severe, which means an attack is highly likely. And this will be decided amongst the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary, MI6, MI5 and counterterrorism policing.

13:08David Yelland:And as John said, there's so much we don't know. I'm sure minds will be jumping to global affairs. There's the fact that this country recently recognized Palestine as a state, as a country. The fact that we are coming up to the second anniversary of October the 7th. Maybe there is a sort of sense of the copycat of the massacre on Israeli Jews of then. I mean, what do authorities do with all these different strands of kind of thought that will be circulating right now?

13:42Andy Hughes:Well, the one thing they look at is what's playing out all over the world. And because what you have found time and time again is events that are playing out all over the world in the Middle East, whether that be in America, it always affects what happens here. And the threat level always goes up here. So the security services, and especially MI6, they completely monitor everything that's going on. And then they then feed it into the security services system. listen we might want to look out for that because this is a certain area of contention this happens all the time and with something like this it's no coincidence that the first thing the security services did was increase security around all synagogues and the whole thing with

14:23Jon Sopel:the security services is and i think that people don't recognize this often enough is how often attacks are thwarted and stopped and the very good intelligence that our security services have and the effectiveness of their counter activities i mean there was going to be an attack i think a few months ago on israeli embassy i think it was that they foiled i mean is this part of something else

14:47Andy Hughes:well 13 terror attacks have been foiled in the last year and these are late stage attacks meaning these attacks were just about to happen these people might have been on their way to commit a terror attack and it would have been thwarted the thing is you or i very rarely hear of these things you only hear of them when they slip through the net like this one and andy is now on his way

15:07Jon Sopel:up to manchester and of course if you want to stay up to date with the latest developments on the unfolding story there do stay tuned to lbc which is available on the free global player app in a moment we'll be talking to somebody who grew up in that area who worked very closely

15:24David Yelland:with the communities in that area for their thoughts on what this is doing now to Manchester.

15:35Jon Sopel:What would you do if you found a way to make endless money? In a damp flat in Blackpool, James Parker did just that. He discovered a way to make Bitcoin out of thin air and it made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But that's when the trouble started. Join me, Lewis Goodall, for my new podcast, coining it, the true story of a man who found a crack in the system and created a fortune that tore lives apart. Listen for free on Global Player, download it from the App Store or head to globalplayer.com.

16:10Andy Hughes:The News Agents.

16:11David Yelland:Well, joining us here in the studio now is David Yelland, friend of the podcast and also the host of When It Hits The Fan. and David you grew up very close to where the attack happened in Manchester you kind of know the feel of the place right?

16:28Andy Hughes:Yeah I grew up in a lot of places in the north but including in Manchester I spent a lot of time in Manchester my one of my first jobs was on the newspaper and I lived very close to where this attack has happened this morning and if you look at that part of Manchester between sort of Berry New Road and Middleton Road where the attack took place there are scores of synagogues. I mean, there are so many synagogues. It is, I think, probably the biggest, well, it is the biggest Jewish community outside London. But the interesting thing is, if you go south, you walk a minute, it's a Muslim area, and there are scores and scores of mosques, side by side.

17:03Andy Hughes:So this is, for a generation now, the Jewish and Islamic and Muslim community in Manchester have lived side by side. They're intermingled. And with good community, really? Yeah, I mean, with very good. But it's a funny thing about Manchester is people don't talk about sort of race relations in the way they do in London. They just get on with it. You know, I mean, not that it's relevant. I'm a Man City fan, so I'm up in Manchester a lot. I know a lot of Jewish fans and there are Muslim fans, but nobody ever thinks about it. You know, there isn't a Muslim club and there isn't a Jewish club. The division is Manchester City and Manchester United.