Brother of Texas Synagogue terrorist confirms his membership of Tablighi Jamaat and blames them for his demise

Gulbar Akram has been talking to the news media a lot lately. This is what he told the Sun on Sunday. Certain people sneer at The Sun newspaper. It is low-brow, lots of celebrity gossip, had the infamous Page 3 pin-up girls for many years,  30 years ago their coverage of the Hillsborough football disaster was so appalling that their sales in Liverpool are miniscule to this day. But it remains the sort of newspaper that ordinary people of all ethnicities read and can relate to, and are more comfortable talking to than the bourgeoise elite Guardian or Independent.

Gulbar, 43, told The Sun on Sunday: “He (Malik Faisal Akram) wasn’t an angel. But if these religious nuts hadn’t got a hold of him, this would never have happened.

Gulbar, Akram and their four brothers were brought up in an Asian community in Blackburn but “in the typical English way”.

Gulbar said they were encouraged to take up both kung fu and boxing. Akram did well at PE, maths and physics at school. But he was expelled for “fighting and hustling”.

His worried parents sent him to military school in the Pakistani city of Jhelum. Akram returned two years later to study business and marketing. But he failed to finish the course.

Gulbar remembered: “He was very intelligent but he was in a rush to make money. He was a proper Del Boy. (Our US readers won’t know the TV comedy Only Fools and Horses as it was never marketed in the USA, but it was about a family of South London market traders, ducking and diving. Very, very funny).  He didn’t care if something was stolen if he could make some money.”

Party-loving Akram …suffered serious injuries in a car crash in September 1998…broke his back and was on painkillers for six months, which Gulbar said changed his personality further.

In 2003 Akram joined the Tablighi Jamaat sect — renouncing his previous lifestyle by burning £60,000 in cash outside the family’s mosque. He called it “dirty money”.

Akram spent time in Pakistan before marrying in Blackburn in 2004. He had five sons and a daughter. But the marriage suffered problems because he would disappear for months on end to carry out religious missionary work.

That is the Tablighi Jamaat way, teams of men tour their mosques throughout the country. Their mosques are often built with dedicated dormitories for the travelling missions. 

Gulbar said: “Different characters started turning up. One of them was locked up for terrorism so the family was worried.”

He was now on the radar of anti-terrorism cops.

In 2016 he rowed with his wife, shut his chain of pharmacies and walked off with £800,000.

Gulbar told how his brother moved around and would disappear and then re-appear in his life.

He added: “He would be alive now if he hadn’t joined the extremists.”

This might be the right place to link again to this article in the Jewish Chronicle last week, where, as well as mentioning the Masjid-e-Irfan mosque in Blackburn where he worshiped, they reported on their inquiries about his mental health.

Much has been written and spoken in the media this week about Akram’s poor mental health — and it has been widely implied that this may have been a key reason for his decision to travel to the US to commit an act of terror.

While some of his friends and family confirmed that he had suffered from poor mental health, others said only that he had become increasingly “short- tempered” and violent.

Moreover, Akram’s former GP told the JC that his medical records showed no mental health complaints. He said that during his dealings with Akram, he had found him to be “an intelligent man who had become extremist in terms of religious views”. The GP added: “He came across as a confident man who didn’t need any mental help.”