The man who killed two men in a mosque on Thursday appeared to be “out of his mind”‚ the son of one of the victims said on Thursday.

Saud Bassa‚ 30‚ said the man arrived during the night at the mosque in Malmesbury‚ in the Western Cape‚ and asked for shelter.

Inside the mosque‚ Bassa’s 72-year-old father‚ Ismail‚ was observing i’tikaaf (night prayers during the last 10 days of Ramadaan) with two clerics and another man.

“Apparently the guy came here and he was in a different kind of state. He wasn’t drunk or anything but he was apparently out of his mind in a certain sense‚” said Saud.

“He claimed that he was just looking for shelter because he wanted to get a lift to Vredenburg the next morning.”

Saud and his brother Faizal‚ 24‚ were awoken at 2.30am by their mother Zainab‚ who heard the moulana knocking frantically on the door of their house‚ which is next to the mosque.

The cleric told Zainab the stranger had attacked the men as they slept.

“I rushed to my children’s room‚ I got them up and they phoned the cops immediately‚ and they rushed to the masjied with some heavy equipment — sticks and all that — and they tried to keep the guy inside the mosque so that he cannot escape‚” Zainab said.

Faizal said he knew he had to enter the mosque because his father was sleeping there. But the attacker had switched off the lights.

“When I went in the guy attacked me and he was attacking the moulana. I got one or two shots in but then he turned around and stabbed me in the face and in the arm‚ and when I tried to get away he stabbed me in the back‚” he said.

The man then fled the mosque‚ with the brothers in pursuit‚ and stopped in an open field about 400m away.

Saud said the man was still acting erratically‚ and he circled him with his car until the police arrived.

They appeared to be unarmed and kept their distance‚ but when a second police vehicle arrived the man attempted to attack it and officers shot him dead.

As dawn broke‚ the man’s body could be seen in the middle of a muddy field in the midst of a storm. His feet were bare and his shoes laid a few metres from him.

A sniffer dog and the bomb squad arrived to check the man for explosives‚ and a knife could be seen lying near his body.

Saud said the priests called a Somali leader to try to speak with the dying man because he could understand neither English nor Afrikaans.

After being treated in hospital‚ Faizal returned to the family home to comfort his widowed mother‚ Zainab.