The nearly 11-hour-standoff at Congregation Beth Israel ended Saturday night with the 44-year-old gunman, Malik Faisal Akram, dead and all hostages safe.
Akram’s criminal background, which reportedly dates back at least two decades and includes a recent prison stint following a 2012 conviction on theft and harassment charges, has critics wondering how the man from Blackburn, England, didn’t trip any security safeguards when entering the U.S.
Malik Faisal Akram was arrested at age 19 for wielding a baseball bat during a fight with his cousins and spent a six-month stint at a young offenders’ institute. Gulbar Akram said their parents had emigrated to the U.K. from Pakistan in the 1960s and raised six sons in Blackburn, England.
A rare judicial ban was issued against Akram in September 2001 following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, a British official confirmed to Fox News. Just a day after four planes were hijacked and crashed by jihad pilots, Akram was accused of remarking to Lancashire court ushers, "You should have been on the f--- plane," according to a letter written by Peter Wells, the deputy justice clerk, to the Lancashire magistrates’ committee.
Akram had a criminal record, an official at the U.K.’s Justice Department confirmed to Fox News Digital. His last brush with the law was in 2012 when he was convicted of theft and harassment. During the time he was in prison for that conviction, Akram reportedly conducted himself in an "extreme" manner when attending the jail’s mosque, and one observer noted he was "obsessed" with Islam, according to the British official.
Two teenagers have been arrested in Manchester, England, as the FBI has extended investigations to London and Tel Aviv to determine whether Akram acted alone or as part of a larger terror cell.