MANCHESTER — British police said on Friday they may have accidentally shot two victims, including one who died, in their attempts to bring under control an attack on a Manchester synagogue during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

In Thursday’s attack two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed after a British man of Syrian descent drove a car into pedestrians and then began stabbing several people outside Manchester’s Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue.

The attacker, whom armed officers shot dead at the scene, was not carrying a firearm, said Greater Manchester Police chief constable Steve Watson, though one of those killed suffered a gunshot wound.

“It follows therefore this injury may have been sustained as a tragic and unforeseen consequence of the urgently required action taken by my officers to bring this vicious attack to an end”, Watson said in a statement.

Watson said another worshipper is believed to have suffered a non life-threatening gunshot wound, and that it is thought both victims were close together behind the synagogue door, as worshippers tried to prevent the attacker from gaining entry.

Police have named the attacker as Jihad al-Shamie, 35, and said they could find no records to show he had been referred to the government’s anti-radicalisation programme.