British police seized mobile phones from a now-dead terrorist twice but never got around to reading what was on them until after he launched a deadly Synagogue attack, they said as one of the man’s associates was handed a life sentence.
The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police has accepted opportunities were missed in the lead-up to the 2025 Heaton Park Synagogue Yom Kippur Attack by Islamist extremist Jihad Al-Shamie which saw three killed, one by the terrorist and two by responding Manchester Police firearms officers.
Jihad Al-Shamie was one of those killed in the attack by police, but had previous contact with the force, having been arrested twice in the months leading up to the October 2025 attack over breaking a harassment order, and over an alleged rape. Police seized a mobile phone from Al-Shamie on both of those occasions but didn’t investigate their contents, which it is now known included extensive extremist chat logs with fellow Islamists and notes on planning a further terror attack.
The contents of those phones, which were analysed after the Heaton Park attack and the death of Al-Shamie, revealed his friendship with 31-year-old extremist Mohammad Bashir. Further police investigation uncovered security camera footage from the mosque the men attended together, cloud computing data, and number plate recognition cameras that revealed just two months before the Synagogue killing the men were heavily involved in planning an attack on a British military installation they believed was being used to train Israeli soldiers.
While Bashir initially denied this course of events after his arrest, being presented with this data evidence led him to change his plea to guilty to preparing an act of terrorism against section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb at Manchester Crown Court sentenced Bashir to life in prison with a minimum term of 16 years.
The court had heard that two months before the Heaton park attack, Bashir drove Al-Shamie on a ten-hour round trip to perform “hostile reconnaissance” against the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. Al-Shamie was able to access the reception area of the establishment and took notes on the layout, recording that the staff present were all women.
The two men discussed preparing for “war” how to get into the Academy, which weapons to use, and a fake suicide vest. The phones taken before the attack but only examined afterwards revealed thousands of Whatsapp messages, membership of extremist group chats, and conversations that betrayed “Antisemitic and antichristian” sentiments and an “extremist, jihadi mindset”.
Further, both men had been overheard on a security camera recording discussing their imending martyrdom and they had also spoken of “restoring glory to Muslim lands by exterminating Jewish men, and taking Jewish women as concubines”.
The planned Shrivenham attack never took place and Al-Shamie launched his own attack, using the same techniques, against the Manchester Synagogue months later without Bashir. The court heard there was no evidence submitted that Bashir had been aware of the Manchester Synagogue plan.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said in her sentencing remarks that Bashir had admitted to being inspired to launch an attack and that his claim to have already deradicalized himself appeared to be a lie. She said “the accounts you gave presented a false narrative, denying your own extremist mindset” and that he’d gone to great lengths to cover up his own involvement, including disposing of his own digital devices.
A spokesman for the Crown Prosecutor said after the life sentence was imposed:
Mohammad Bashir is a determined jihadist and dangerous individual who was planning an attack that could have caused devastation.
His actions demonstrate a deliberate and sustained commitment to violent extremism, including conducting reconnaissance, sharing extremist material, and discussing weapons and plans capable of causing significant harm.
While Al Shamie ultimately carried out a separate attack independently, the evidence shows that Bashir played a key role in earlier preparations for a potential mass casualty incident.
The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police accepted his force had been at fault by not investigating the seized mobile phones earlier, but stopped short of an apology, stating that an ongoing investigation would “determine the impact of not reviewing the contents of the devices”. He said:
It is factually the case that Al-Shamie had come to the notice of GMP in respect of two linked criminal allegations which did not relate to terrorist offences… At the time of his committing the attack at the Heaton Park Synagogue, Al-Shamie was on police bail.
In conducting an internal review, it became apparent that GMP had seized Al-Shamie’s mobile devices, at the point of each arrest. The significance of the data contents of these devices was substantial, in respect of evidencing an extremist mindset. Regrettably, I can confirm that the significance of the information stored on Al-Shamie’s devices was not realised as they had not been examined before the attack took place on the 2nd of October 2025.
… [There can] be little doubt that the information contained within these devices would have inspired further investigative action. It is clear that our not having reviewed the data available to us prior to the attack, constitutes a missed opportunity.
As earlier reported by Breitbart News, the fumbled phone evidence Greater Manchester Police held in their custody months before the Synagogue attack was not the only dropped ball. Al-Shamie’s former neighbours came forward after the attack to reveal they had reported him for becoming radicalised as long as five years prior. One neighbour said he started “to preach to local kids about the Qur’an” and “started wearing all the robes and everything. I thought [one relative] was being radicalised because he wouldn’t speak to us for a bit… They didn’t have any white friends. I thought: what the heck is going on? It wasn’t just praying in the garden – it was private and secret”.
An ex-girlfriend of the dead Islamist, who said she was “groomed” by him as a teenager spoke of his interest in “extreme videos”, rape, and violence, having threatened to hill her “with his bare hands”.