Blazingcatfur

At 9.31 on the morning of Yom Kippur last year, a man named Jihad Al-Shamie drove his Kia Picanto into the security gates of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall, Manchester. He then got out and resumed the attack with a knife. He was wearing what looked to everyone present like a suicide belt. The first 999 call came from witnesses at the scene; it was only after firearms officers were already making their way to the synagogue that Al-Shamie himself rang emergency services to claim responsibility and pledge allegiance to Islamic State – a gesture that resolved any ambiguity about his motivation with an efficiency the subsequent police communications would struggle to match. Armed officers shot him dead within seven minutes. Melvin Cravitz, aged 66, and Adrian Daulby, 53, were killed; Daulby, it later emerged, by a round from one of the responding officers, a tragedy Greater Manchester Police handled with considerably more transparency than they managed with their characterisation of the attack itself.