Michigan Synagogue Attacker Sent Quran‑Themed Rifle Photo Before Assault

CBS News reports that Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the man who rammed a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and opened fire on March 12, had taken and edited a photo of himself posing with the AR‑style rifle used in the attack and sent it that day to a family member in Lebanon. In the image, verified to CBS by a U.S. official, Ghazali is dressed in black, wearing a black‑and‑white scarf, holding a scoped semiautomatic rifle, and overlaid with Quranic verses in Arabic about believers fulfilling vows and a reference to "vengeance." Investigators say Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from a Hezbollah‑controlled town in southern Lebanon where four relatives — including at least one confirmed Hezbollah commander brother — were killed in a March 5 Israeli drone strike, waited in the synagogue parking lot for two hours before ramming his vehicle into the building, igniting a fire, injuring a security guard, and then engaging in a gunfight with two guards before shooting himself. The FBI is treating the incident as a "targeted act of violence against the Jewish community," and DHS confirms Ghazali entered the U.S. legally in 2011 and became a citizen in 2016. The article also reveals he spent more than $2,000 on fireworks days earlier, telling a store employee he was buying them to "celebrate the end of Ramadan," and that his ex‑wife phoned police just before the attack to warn he was "not stable," sharpening questions about ideology, foreign ties, and missed warning signs around an attack that occurred while children were in school inside the synagogue.