The Israeli military said Sunday that the brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who is accused of carrying out last week’s attack at a Michigan synagogue, was a Hezbollah commander who was “eliminated” in a strike last week.
In a statement on social media, the Israel Defense Forces said Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations for the unit within the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
“The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war,” the IDF said, adding Ibrahim Ghazali was killed in an airstrike on a Hezbollah military structure last week.
A Lebanese official, who requested anonymity because he could not publicly discuss details of the airstrike, confirmed to the Associated Press that Ibrahim Ghazali was killed. The official told AP that Ibrahim Ghazali’s children, Ali and Fatima, and brother, Kassim, were also killed in the strike that hit their home just after sunset.
A freelance journalist working for CBS News in Lebanon was told by sources there that the two brothers were both members of a Hezbollah rocket unit in southern Lebanon.
The FBI’s Detroit office, which is investigating the attack at the synagogue, declined to comment to CBS News on the claims by Israel’s military 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.
Ayman Ghazali, a 41-year-old Lebanese-born U.S. citizen, is accused of ramming a truck into Temple Israel synagogue outside Detroit on Thursday after learning that four of his family members had been killed in an Israeli strike in Lebanon, officials said.
Ayman Ghazali waited in his car outside Temple Israel for about two hours with a rifle, commercial-grade fireworks and jugs of liquid believed to be gasoline, before crashing into the building where more than a hundred children were attending classes, according to authorities.
He started firing his gun through the windshield, exchanging fire with an armed security guard. He died by suicide after he got stuck in his vehicle and the engine caught fire, FBI Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan said on Friday.
No one else was killed in the attack, officials said, but a security guard was injured, and dozens of law enforcement officers were treated for smoke inhalation.
The FBI called it a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Ayman Ghazali came to the U.S. legally in May 2011, sponsored by his then-wife, who is a U.S. citizen. He became a U.S. citizen himself in 2016.
The attack on the Michigan synagogue took place on the same day as a former Army National Guard member, who served years in prison for attempting to aid the Islamic State, opened fire on a classroom at Old Dominion University in Virginia, killing one person and wounding two others.