Two Died at a Synagogue. His Messages Exposed a Second Plot.
On July 23, 2026, a British court sentenced Mohammad Bashir to life in prison for preparing a terrorist attack on a United Kingdom military academy. The plot surfaced only after an associate, Jihad al-Shamie, killed two men at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur — and investigators traced the scheme through the messages the two men had exchanged.
A British court has sentenced a man to life in prison for preparing a terrorist attack on a United Kingdom military academy — a plot that came to light only when investigators worked through the aftermath of a deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue, The Washington Post reported. The man, Mohammad Bashir, was not involved in the synagogue attack itself; but WhatsApp messages and other communications between him and the attacker revealed that the two had planned to strike a military target, according to the Post.
A plot exposed by a murder inquiry
Bashir was not present when the synagogue was attacked, and he was not accused of carrying it out. What tied him to terrorism was the evidence recovered as investigators worked backward from that attack: communications between Bashir and the attacker showing that the two had planned to target the United Kingdom’s Defence Academy, a site west of London that trains British armed forces personnel, the Post reported. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The evidence was in the messages
The trail ran through the two men’s phones. Investigators uncovered Bashir’s plot through evidence that included WhatsApp messages and other exchanges between him and the attacker, according to The Washington Post. It was a plan documented not in the open, but in private messaging — the channel where the intention to attack was set down, and, ultimately, the record that convicted him.
The Yom Kippur attack
The attack that led to Bashir’s exposure took place on Oct. 2, 2025, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year, at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester, in northwest England. Jihad al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, drove a car into people, attacked worshippers with a knife and tried to force his way into the building before he was shot dead by police, CNN reported. Two men were killed and several other people were wounded.
The two who died were named as Melvin Cravitz, 66, and Adrian Daulby, 53, according to Al Jazeera. During the assault, al-Shamie telephoned Britain’s emergency line and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, police said, though officials found no evidence that he belonged to any organized network, CNN reported. Police declared the attack a terrorist incident the same day, according to NBC News.
An investigation that ran through phones and accounts
The synagogue attack set off a large counterterrorism investigation, and police arrested several people in the days that followed, CBS News reported. It was that inquiry — examining the devices and communications linked to al-Shamie — that surfaced the separate plot for which Bashir was convicted, the Post reported.
The sequence is one that has become familiar in cases of Islamist and other extremist violence: an attack carried out in the physical world, and a plan that lived in the digital one. Al-Shamie had declared his allegiance out loud during the attack itself, as reported by The Washington Post; the earlier plot he shared with Bashir was quieter, set down in messages that outlasted him and put another man in prison for life.