JERUSALEM — The brother of a man who attacked a Michigan synagogue last week was a Hezbollah commander who was killed this month in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, Israel’s military said Sunday.
Ibrahim Ghazali was killed in Lebanon along with three other relatives of the attacker a week before his brother Ayman Mohammad Ghazali drove his car into a synagogue outside Detroit and was killed in a confrontation with private security officers.
The FBI’s Detroit office, which is investigating the attack, declined to comment on the Israeli military claims about Ibrahim Ghazali.
“Out of respect for the ongoing investigation, we will continue to refrain from commenting on its substance,” FBI spokesman Jordan Hall said in an email Sunday.
The Associated Press was not immediately able to verify the claim that Ibrahim Ghazali was a member of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon.
The Israeli military alleges he was a commander in the group who managed weapons for a unit that fired rockets at Israel.
A Lebanese official, who requested anonymity because he could not publicly discuss details of the airstrike, confirmed Ibrahim Ghazali’s death, telling the AP that Ghazali’s children, Ali and Fatima, and brother, Kassim, were also killed in the strike on their home just after sunset.
Authorities have said that Ayman Ghazali, 41, carried out the synagogue attack after learning that four family members were killed in the Israeli strike.
Israel has stepped up attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon as the war with Iran has spread across the Middle East.
On Thursday, Ayman Ghazali waited in his car outside Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., for about two hours with a rifle, commercial-grade fireworks and jugs of liquid believed to be gasoline, before crashing into the building full of dozens of children, according to authorities.
He started firing his gun through the windshield, exchanging fire with a temple security guard. Ghazali fatally shot himself after he got stuck in his vehicle and the engine caught fire, said Jennifer Runyan, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Detroit field office. Previous reports had indicated the guard fatally shot Ghazali.
No staffers or children inside the synagogue were hurt, probably due to beefed-up security in recent months.
The FBI, which is leading the investigation, described the attack on one of the nation’s largest Reform synagogues as an act of violence targeting the Jewish community, but said that it didn’t have enough evidence yet to call it an act of terrorism.
Ghazali came to the U.S. in 2011 on an immediate relative visa as the spouse of an American citizen and was granted citizenship in 2016, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
He lived in a single-story brick home in Dearborn Heights, a suburb of Detroit about 40 miles south of the synagogue.
The attack on the Michigan synagogue took place the same day that a former Army National Guard member — who served years in prison for attempting to aid the extremist group Islamic State — opened fire on a classroom at Old Dominion University in Virginia, killing one person and wounding two others.
Frankel and Mroue write for the Associated Press and reported from Jerusalem and Beirut, respectively.
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