UK police may have accidentally shot dead victim in synagogue attack

British police said on Friday they may have accidentally shot two victims, including one who died, in their attempts to bring under control an attack on a Manchester synagogue during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

In Thursday's attack two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed after a British man of Syrian descent drove a car into pedestrians and then began stabbing several people outside Manchester's Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue.

The attacker, whom armed officers shot dead at the scene, was not carrying a firearm, said Greater Manchester Police chief constable Steve Watson, though one of those killed suffered a gunshot wound. "It follows therefore this injury may have been sustained as a tragic and unforeseen consequence of the urgently required action taken by my officers to bring this vicious attack to an end", Watson said in a statement.

Watson said another worshipper is believed to have suffered a non life-threatening gunshot wound, and that it is thought both victims were close together behind the synagogue door, as worshippers tried to prevent the attacker from gaining entry.

Police have named the attacker as Jihad al-Shamie, 35, and said they could find no records to show he had been referred to the government's anti-radicalisation programme.

The British government vowed to redouble its efforts to tackle antisemitism as the Jewish community reeled from the attack.

On Friday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the site of the attack and spoke with members of the Jewish community.

Police also urged organisers of a planned protest in London this weekend in support of a banned pro-Palestinian group to cancel or postpone the event, saying it would divert police resources needed to protect fearful communities. Organisers said the protest, the latest in a series in which police have arrested more than 1,500 people, would go ahead, and that it was the police's choice whether to make more arrests of people "peacefully holding signs".

Like other European countries and the United States, Britain has recorded a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in the nearly two years since the war in Gaza started.