As I set out on the road to Manchester on Thursday morning, Google Maps told me in her plain American voice that “Heaton Park Shul may be closed”. The computer seemed to know more than I did, but the broad outline was clear from gruesome videos on social media, brief press reports and the details Greater Manchester Police had shared.
On Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a man drove his car into a crowd outside a synagogue in the Crumpsall area of the city. He emerged from the car with a knife and what looked like a suicide belt. He then stabbed two people to death, used the knife to put four others in a serious condition in hospital and was shot dead by armed police within seven minutes of the first 999 call. The slaughter was soon declared a terrorist incident. Two suspected accomplices had been arrested at a nearby address. The Home Secretary was on her way.
I left the car by Heaton Park, ten minutes from the scene, and headed across on foot. This is a suburb where the lamp posts wear “This is a HomeWatch Area” signs. Some also carry the yellow ribbons that demand the release of hostages in Gaza, an indication of the large Jewish population here.
I walked past large semi-detached houses with bay windows and front gardens that slope down to wide tree-lined streets. I passed a home that smelled of toast, another where some builders were going to work on a frame of scaffolding. A Super Whippy ice cream van was parked in a driveway.
The postman going from house to house on the street next to the killings shouted that he didn’t know anything about that, sorry. And his English is bad, so if I could politely go away, please. We were shouting at each other because of the helicopter thrumming in circles overhead.
Descending a gentle hill, I first saw the fleet of vans and camera crews that are contrary to all the principles of suburbia. The street behind the police cordon was a scene of frozen chaos. A car askew in the middle of the road with its doors flung open, panda cars all growling around it, a fire engine behind. By the time I arrived things were quiet and still, bar the wrapper from a multipack of water bottles that danced back and forth across the road marks. Only police, fire brigade, paramedics and yellow-capped men from the Community Security Trust (CST), a Jewish safety charity, were permitted to approach the scene.
A group of relatives sat on a low wall beside the police line, hugging and huddling. “Our rabbi doesn’t want us to say any more, so I’m afraid I’m not going to say any more,” said Shirley, a local congregant who knows the families. She was standing guard beside them. Further back from the scene, elderly congregants sat on a line of brown leather-upholstered dining table chairs brought out from one of the houses. Staring blankly, they would not speak.
Kovi, a teenager who lives 20 minutes away, comes here every year on Yom Kippur to see friends. “I have two people I know who have been affected by this. I don’t want to go into any details but –” he spoke softly before steeling himself, “I don’t want to speak for them but it’s disgusting. It’s a travesty. It’s an absolute travesty. We need to say now that this – anti-Semitism – is an issue. This is a nice area. Coming here is an annual tradition for me.”
I’m not sure who else I expected to find at the site of a terrorist attack and attempted mass murder. But there they were, massing at the front by the cordon. A man with a Celtic cross tattooed on his temple was filming with his iPhone and getting a little too close to the police for their comfort. Two kids on BMXes wearing face coverings were craning their necks for a better look. There was a couple with three young children, one in its mother’s arms, who had come from Oldham to see what was going on.
Then there were the YouTubers: the live streamer with the selfie stick who had rushed here as soon as he heard the news; another with a hand-held camera who came over to fist-bump him; and Billy Moore, the former boxer from Liverpool and now an evangelical Christian influencer – the most famous of the group. They were there to find out what the mainstream media wouldn’t tell them.
At the time, the identity of the the man suspected of carrying out the attack was still unconfirmed, though police later named him as 35-year-old Jihad Al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent.
Beneath the waveform-thrum of the helicopter blades, what information there was broke through in newsreader voices, overheard in snatches as TV crews broadcast from the scene: “… appeared to have several packages attached to him…”, “… have declared this a terrorist incident…”.
Then the call came, and the pack moved. Greater Manchester Police had arranged a press conference five minutes’ drive away, at the local secondary school, and just in time for the final bell of the school day. (GMP headquarters was judged too far away.)
With notepads and cameras and tripods and microphones, we all parked up and pushed on foot through a chattering wall of burgundy blazers. It seemed most of the children hadn’t heard: the comforting safety of suburbia still intact for them. It would not be for long.
The press officers were strict on the door, demanding evidence of accreditation. A woman dressed all in yellow explained: “We’ve had trouble with the auditors. They’ve been very aggressive today.” I was momentarily bemused – police auditors? She meant, of course, the men who I had just been talking to at the scene of the crime with their selfie sticks. They’d heard about the press conference too and had questions of their own.
The conference was upstairs in a classroom slightly reorganised for the purpose. The pupil’s chairs had become a semicircle. At the teacher’s table the press pack had already assembled a battery of black-barrelled microphones.
There were groans when we heard the Chief Constable was delayed by nearly an hour. Then we heard that the national papers were sending reinforcements from London. A reporter, who is a veteran of these “jobs”, explained: “If they release the names of the killer and all the victims, that’s a hell of a lot of doors to knock.” I found the camaraderie of the crime beat a little jolting.
When the chief constable, Stephen Watson, finally arrived he ended much speculation by setting out the horror in detail. Four in a serious condition in hospital. Two dead. Then the attacker dead too. Two more arrested. The supposed bomb was “not viable”, and we all debated whether that meant fake or shoddy. Watson left.
There was a lull in proceedings. We had a few hours until the Home Secretary would arrive at the scene and so the press pack broke apart. I stopped at a dessert café nearby to type up my notes. The woman behind the counter brought my drink. “It’s a nice area this, everyone gets on – it’s not normal [what happened],” she said, with the umbrage of a proud local. “But there’ll be tensions again now.” Tensions. Again. This is England today, it seems: a land of tensions and violence, where Jews are no longer safe.
Chief Constable Watson said the attack would have “great impact not just in Greater Manchester but across our country”. Already the Prime Minister has announced that “additional police assets” have been deployed at synagogues around Britain. Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, called it a “horrific anti-Semitic attack on our Jewish friends and neighbours”.
Though the police’s investigation into the perpetrator rolls on, the motive of this attack was immediately established by the circumstances. The decision to attack a people’s place of worship betrayed a ferocious contempt. To do so on that religion’s holiest day, when the place would be at its fullest, showed added layers of premeditated cruelty.
Keir Starmer, who has Jewish relatives on his wife’s side, told Britain’s Jewish communities in a statement: “I promise to do everything in my power to guarantee you the security you deserve.”
He has also now warned of a “rising tide of anti-Semitism”. Already today there are those who say it should never have come to this. “Security duty” – the guarding of synagogues from potential attacks – has become an everyday obligation for British Jews. The Home Office has collected data showing a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the UK since the terror attacks of 7 October 2023 in Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. In July a report by John Mann and Penny Mordaunt warned there had been an “unacceptable” rise in anti-Semitism across British civil society since 7 October.
Amid the pain and grief here in Manchester, politics quickly began to intervene. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the slaughter in Manchester was a result of too much focus on the Middle East war. She said: “I think that that’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen attacks like this increase all around the world.” An MI5 official told the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner that the war was “a running sore that is radicalising people” across borders. The terror group Islamic State, it has been noted, ordered its followers to commit attacks against Jewish targets in Europe last month.
Some have partly laid the blame on British civil society, also drawing in the war unfolding thousands of miles away. Gideon Falter, the chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, made an excoriating statement in the immediate aftermath of the attack, saying “the blood of British Jews is on the hands of virtue-signalling politicians who have poured fuel on the fire of extremism with their posturing and appeasement”.
It seemed to be a reference to the government’s hardening stance against the Israeli government, which has included an embargo on arms sales and recently the recognition of a State of Palestine. He also condemned police forces, the BBC and the Charity Commission for a lack of “firm and urgent action”. Meanwhile Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, has blamed “blatant and rampant anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli incitement” in Britain.
In the wake of the horror, there are much broader rhetorical battle lines being drawn. Here in Manchester’s shattered suburbia, they are weeping for the innocents.
[Further reading: The end of the woke policing myth]
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