When Elizabeth Davis heard of an attack on the synagogue in Heaton Park in Manchester, she switched on the television breaking news – and instantly recognised the blurred image of the terrorist on the screen.
Arms held aloft, wearing a ‘suicide belt’ while police marksmen trained their weapons on him, the man staring back at her was her estranged husband – who three days earlier had told her he was going on holiday.
Jihad Al-Shamie was the man to whom she had been married for a turbulent and distressing 12 months – a situation that left the hard-working NHS worker’s family and friends desperately worried about her.
While still reeling from the realisation that the man she had shared a bed with was responsible for a murderous attack on a Jewish place of worship in the name of Islam, her front door was suddenly bashed in.
The next thing she remembers is armed police in her lounge ordering her to get on her knees with a gun barrel inches from her face.
Now released from custody, Elizabeth, a Muslim convert who first met Al-Shamie on the Islamic dating app MuzMatch, has broken her silence on her miserable life with the Islamic State-inspired terrorist.
In an exclusive interview the 46-year-old mother of five tells the Daily Mail how sex-obsessed and controlling Al-Shamie became withdrawn when was sacked from his job with Bupa earlier this year.
- Al-Shamie was obsessed with sex and once raped her in his own parent’s house
- Al-Shamie ordered her to have an abortion when she became pregnant and believed it was ‘Allah’s will’ when she later miscarried
- Wanted her to wear a burka and complained her children were ‘too westernised’
- Disturbingly told her ‘all martyrs die with a smile on their face’ – and only finally gave in to her demand for her divorce in a 2am call five days before the attack
Mrs Davis, a hospital nursing assistant for 20 years, began looking for love on the dating app early in 2024 after losing two partners in the previous few years.
First the father of her five children died in 2017, following a two-year battle with an aggressive form of cancer. Then a few years later, after Elizabeth had met and fallen in love with another man from North Wales, he too became ill and died.
It was at this point after much reflection that twice bereaved Elizabeth decided to turn to Islam and join the religion having a ceremony, called a shahada, in her local mosque in Farnworth.
Pictured: Elizabeth Davis ,46, the third wife of Heaton Park synagogue terrorist Jihad Al-Shamie
First the father of her five children died in 2017, following a two-year battle with an aggressive form of cancer. Then a few years later, after Elizabeth had met and fallen in love with another man from North Wales, he too became ill and died
Jihad Al-Shamie (pictured) was the man to whom Elizabeth had been married for a turbulent and distressing 12 months
Jihad al-Shamie, 35, drove to the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur – and stabbed a worshipper before being shot dead
Elizabeth said: ‘Before Islam, I didn’t feel like I had a religion. I believed in God, I have always believed in God – one God – but I’ve never practiced anything. So that was something that was missing in my life.
‘Obviously after those two people passed away I started to question what life was all about? And that made me look even more into it.
‘Islam is a nice religion if you follow it properly the way it is supposed to be followed. I liked that everybody looked after each other in a Muslim community.
‘I liked the values of being kind to people. As a Muslim you need to be kind to people, you need to give charity to people. I was attracted to all of that.’
Initially Elizabeth’s family were shocked by her decision to convert but they insist no one ‘cast her away or discarded her’.
She said: ‘They thought it was like a phase I was going through, but I told them no, this is it now. I have made my decision, and I am a Muslim. It was my own conscious decision. When people realised that everyone was fine.
‘You get some people looking at you because obviously they can see I am white. I always tell people to come and ask me and I’ll tell you about it.’
Following her years of heartbreak and grief, Elizabeth was hoping to find a Muslim man to marry and start a new life together.
She wanted to have a proper marriage, where the couple would live together and look after each other into their old age.
Hopeful of finding this, she turned to the Muslim dating app Muzmatch where she began speaking with Al-Shamie, who would go by the letter ‘J’ – short for the name he would become nationally notorious for having…Jihad.
After constant messaging back and forth, as well as a phone call about her conversion to Islam, the pair decided to meet in person.
‘I was telling him I was looking to get married and have an Islamic marriage to someone who I got on well with, someone who has the same values as me, just that kind of thing,’ she said.
‘At first I thought he wasn’t really my type but then I got talking to him and started to quite like him.’
They started seeing each other regularly over the following six months and by June Al-Shamie was begging Elizabeth to marry him.
She kept rejecting his unsolicited proposals, telling him she was ‘not ready’ and that it was too soon.
Elizabeth added: ‘I wanted to get to know him properly first because I wanted someone who was going to move in, going to be a proper husband and all that.’
The marriage certificate of Jihad Al-Shamie
The couple started seeing each other regularly over the following six months and by June Al-Shamie was begging Elizabeth to marry him
Elizabeth turned to the Muslim dating app Muzmatch where she began speaking with Al-Shamie, who would go by the letter ‘J’ – short for the name he would become nationally notorious for having…Jihad
Yet Al-Shamie persisted and one day out of the blue he asked Elizabeth to come round to his parents’ house, where he was living at the time, as he had a ‘surprise’ for her.
Elizabeth said: ‘He was smiling at me and I said why are you looking at me like that? So he tells me to come sit down and I see these flowers and chocolates and things like that and perfume on the table.
‘I said what’s all this for and he just said to sit down and that he had someone calling in a minute. Then it clicked what he had done. He was arranging the marriage with somebody on the phone to get married there and then in his living room.
‘It was an Islamic wedding and he was saying to me ‘all you have to do is say, yes, yes’ that’s it. They were chanting all of these things off at me, in Arabic, which I couldn’t understand. And then that was it – we were Islamically married in his living room.’
Elizabeth thought the marriage ceremony was ‘weird’ and felt as though she had been ‘pressured’ into taking part but whenever she brought up issues in their relationship he would tell her ‘we will talk about it later’ – but they never did.
Soon after they had married in this unusual and disturbing way, Al-Shamie’s behaviour towards Elizabeth started to change.
He began to start adopting what she now realises were classic coercive control strategies.
‘Sometimes he was nice to me and other times he was very controlling,’ she recalls. ‘One time I remember being late and if I was late, I’d turn up and he’d grab me by the throat and say things like ‘what have I told you about being late?’
‘And I would say what do you mean, I’ve been stuck in traffic or something, I can’t get to you immediately. And he would say: ‘I’ve told you to be on time. Say sorry to your husband.’ His grip would then get tighter while he would repeat ‘Say sorry, say sorry’.
‘Sometimes I would just laugh at him and he would let go of me but then other times his grip would get tighter so I would have to apologise and say sorry.’
More issues then started to arise – the next antagonism being that Al-Shamie was not happy with her young adult children’s behaviour.
‘He used to come round to mine a lot and then one particular night he wasn’t happy because my son was drinking a can of lager.
‘After that he said ‘I am not coming to your house again, I can’t be around your kids the way they are. You’ve got one drinking alcohol and you’ve got two girls who are too Westernised, they are going out drinking, they are not fully dressed.’
‘He said he could not be around that environment and he didn’t like the girls having boyfriends.’
Synagogue attacker Jihad Al-Shamie’s profile on Muslim dating app Muzmatch – which he used to trawl for women, eventually taking three wives simultaneously
Jihad Al-Shamie (pictured working out at the gym) made the call claiming responsibility for the attack after driving at people in his car outside Heaton Park Hebrew Synagogue in Crumpsall, Manchester
Elizabeth would plead with him and try to explain that while she was Muslim, her children were not and that it was not fair for her – or him – to ‘dictate’ her religious views onto them. Yet the trauma surgeon’s son Al-Shamie would not accept this and henceforth refused to come to Elizabeth’s house.
He then started to try and dictate what she would wear – telling her she would need to cover her whole face and make sure her feet were not on show.
‘He said if I didn’t cover my hair and feet he would be classed as something called a ‘dayouth’ – which is something where the male allows his wife or female family members to go out uncovered basically and it is a sin upon him,’ she added.
The tipping point came late last year, after Elizabeth had become pregnant shortly into their ill-fated marriage.
When she had told Al-Shamie she was expecting a baby he ordered her to get an abortion. Elizabeth refused and even after his bullying her ‘to do what you are told’ she stood her ground.
Then, two months into her pregnancy, in December 2024, Elizabeth had a miscarriage. Feeling upset and vulnerable, she looked to him for support – but got none.
‘Basically he did not care,’ she recalls. ‘He was not bothered. He just said ‘What Allah wills’ basically.
‘He didn’t come with me to the hospital or anything. My family took me instead and I was in a lot of pain. But it was as if he wasn’t bothered, he didn’t show any compassion towards me. He was very dismissive of me at that time – all the time really.’
Sickeningly, in the hours following the miscarriage, Al-Shamie asked Elizabeth if she had ‘stopped bleeding’ – so that they could have sex again.
One of Elizabeth’s family members, who did not want to be named, supports her account on this point: ‘All he was bothered about is when he could have sex again. All he’d be asking her is when can you have sex again, when can you have sex again?’
‘I feel that is all he wanted. That’s how he made me feel,’ Elizabeth added. ‘The minute I got there [to his house] straight away we would have sex and then after that it was lesson time where he would read passages from the Quran and stuff like that.
‘I was also not allowed to leave until I had ‘fulfilled his needs’ and satisfied him – and that could be multiple times. Even if I had problems going on at home or I had to go to the kids he wouldn’t let me leave until afterwards.’
And after his distressing experience, the marriage, then only six months old, deteriorated still further.
‘He told me: ‘No more male friends, don’t speak to any males’. And at one point he even told me to stop speaking to my patients at the hospital
‘I would say ‘How is that possible? I have male patients’. Don’t speak to them unless you have to speak with them’ he would say. But that’s my job. I had to speak to them.’
She was distressed at the time, now she’s angry as she realises what her husband was doing: ‘It was coercive and controlling,’ she says.
A bomb disposal technician works by the body of Al-Shamie after the attack
Melvin Cravitz, 66, (left) and Adrian Daulby, 53 (right) both died during the terror attack
Al-Shamie, who was on bail for rape at the time of the Manchester synagogue attack, finally submitted Elizabeth to her worst ordeal when she visited him at his parents’ house earlier this year.
‘He basically scraped me up and threw me on the bed,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I had been saying to him ‘No’ – we had just done it already – but his weight was too much on top of me and I couldn’t push him off…’
He then raped her.
‘Afterwards it didn’t even register with him what had happened. It was like this was normal. ‘In Islam, you have to fulfil your husband’s needs…’
Following the rape, Elizabeth told him she wanted a divorce – but for months he refused to discuss or engage with her.
It was during this period of semi-estrangement that Elizabeth believes Al-Shamie had some sort of warped epiphany that led to him turning to terror – and that it was triggered by him being made redundant.
She explained: ‘It was when he lost his last job that he became more withdrawn. He had been working for Bupa, until just a couple of months ago, but then he rang me and said he had been fired.
‘Before that he was doing his job and everything – going to the gym, playing football. But then that all seemed to stop – as if he wasn’t doing anything. It felt like he had become a recluse.
‘And I tried to avoid seeing him. I would tell him I was working late shifts and couldn’t see him. I just felt there was no relationship there after the way he used to treat me. I knew that wasn’t right.
‘I felt like I was being used and I kept asking him for a divorce but he would say things like ‘I’ll divorce you when I am ready’ so it was as if I couldn’t get away.’
This stand off endured until the week that he would launch his attack at Heaton Park Synagogue, on Thursday 2nd October during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar.
Elizabeth continues: ‘Five days before the attack he rang me in the early hours of the morning saying ‘You can have your divorce’. I was asleep when he rang, it was two o’clock in the morning.
‘He said he was going on holiday, he didn’t say where. He just said he was going away so we wouldn’t be able to be together anymore anyways because it would be a long distance.’
Five days later, Al-Shamie rammed his black Kia Picanto hatchback into crowds of Jewish worshippers at 9.31am, before going on a stabbing spree killing Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66.
Elizabeth had been at home when she found out about the attack and spotted her husband pictured on the national news.
Hours later, armed police arrived at her home arresting her in connection with the terror attack.
She was released six days later without charge after being questioned by police about her relationship with Al-Shamie.
‘I was locked up in the cell for six days giving interviews,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I was in shock and I felt generally unwell. I just didn’t feel well. I just wanted to go home. I wanted them to do what they needed to do and let me go.
‘I was telling them I am innocent, I am innocent. I didn’t know what was going on on the outside. It was just a very traumatic experience and that’s all I can really say about it.
‘To think I was in a relationship with a person that could do such a thing makes me feel sick because I have been deceived and I just can’t believe it. I still question if this is real?’
It was only when Elizabeth was released from prison that she discovered that her husband was apparently a bigamist – who had not only one but two wives whom he had married before her.
‘I knew he had a first wife who he told me he was divorced from with three children. I didn’t know anything else about any other wives.
‘I thought I was the only one, but I only found out after everything that happened that there were multiple wives. He completely deceived me. I only found out all of this after I was released from my arrest.’
Since her release, Elizabeth says she has felt haunted by the whole experience. Some of her neighbours have ignored her, she says, others have called her a ‘terrorist’.
She has been suffering with night terrors, waking up in the night in distress, and has now been referred to a therapist.
But she remains determined to get on with the rest of her life and to put this traumatic period behind her.
She said: ‘I have been deceived by this man. I feel like he’s taken advantage of my kindness and I am disgusted by the act that he committed.
‘To me that is not Islam. That is not what people do in Islam. In Islam people are supposed to be kind and help each other and do good deeds and that is what Islam is.
‘He is a monster. Someone I did not know. An imposter. That is basically what it is. I knew a false version of him. I want people to see I was just a victim because that’s all I was.
‘My thoughts are with the Jewish community and those who died because I felt sick for them when it happened for them. I was thinking about their families and what they are going through.
‘He’s just ruined so many lives hasn’t he? One person has destroyed so many people’s lives. This has all been a really bad dream for me and I just want to get on with my life.’
