HAUNTED BY THE LESSON OF LONDON BRIDGE TERROR
Education authorities are facing up to their failure to realise that extremists had infiltrated a primary school. One of its teachers killed eight in an atrocity in the UK capital last year, writes Paul Peachey
Twenty-four hours after Khuram Butt led his last Quranic class at an English Islamic school in June last year, he strapped on a fake suicide vest, pumped himself up with steroids and committed a terrorist atrocity.
The extremist led three men in a murderous attack on the capital’s London Bridge, mowing down pedestrians before embarking on a stabbing frenzy that killed eight and injured dozens before the militants were shot dead by police.
What was not known then was that for four months before the attack, Butt, 27, had been given the opportunity to mould the minds of young Muslims at the Eton community school near London.
He had no Arabic, no specialist knowledge and was unsupervised despite having a police caution for violence.
The fallout from the murders and the scandal of the unsupervised sessions ended this month with the school’s head receiving a life ban from teaching.
But an investigation by The
National has revealed flaws within the British schooling system that allowed extremism to flourish unchecked.
Even before the revelation of Butt’s lessons, the school remained open after its founder was exposed as a key player for the now banned extremist group Al Muhajiroun. His wife was the school’s former head teacher but she had tried to hide their relationship from the authorities.
Sophie Rahman said laws that ensured schools played their part in identifying extremism were an attempt to silence Muslims from speaking out against “state-structured discrimination”.
And yet just months before the school was effectively closed by its landlord, a Muslim charity dedicated to countering radicalisation, officers for the English school inspection agency Ofsted found the school’s leaders had taken effective action to ensure a “far more robust” culture of protection in the school.
“Either the inspectors are not up to the job, they don’t ask the right questions or they’re not probing deeply enough,” said Mike Gapes, the local member of parliament, who had previously raised concerns about the school in the House of Commons.
“Or they’re having the wool pulled over their eyes by a school who created a facade while the really extremist stuff was happening behind.”
The case follows another this year when an administrator was convicted for trying to recruit 300 children at a different independent Muslim school to act as a “death squad sent by Allah” and carry out terrorist attacks.
Inspectors had once described the school as outstanding, despite such activity being at its height.
The cases have exposed the failings of an inspection regime that has been subject to constant financial cuts over a decade, leading to a shortage of monitors, the UK’s spending watchdog said in May.
Butt’s school in Ilford, Essex opened in September 2009, charging £2,040 (Dh9,820) a year to provide “very high quality education alongside classical Islamic culturing”, its website said.
Its social media sites showed happy children making and selling cakes, collecting money for people in Syria. The reality was not so sweet.
The school’s proprietor and main shareholder, Sajeel Shahid, set up a terrorist training camp in Pakistan that was attended by the leader of the July 7, 2005 attacks on the London transport network, which killed 52 people.
Mr Shahid was reportedly sent from Britain by the leaders of Al Muhajiroun to become a key figure in Pakistan, where extremists were sent to train before returning to Britain to plot bombings.
He holds a degree in computer science from Manchester and ran the group’s safe houses in Lahore. In 2001, he told a newspaper: “We see the American and British governments as the biggest terrorists in the world.”
Mr Shahid was named in a 2007 court case as a contact for the leader of a plot to target shopping centres and nightclubs in Britain with bombs made using fertiliser.
Five men were jailed in 2007 but he was not prosecuted. He was held for several months in Pakistan in 2005, according to reports, and expelled over alleged links to Al Qaeda.
Despite his background, Mr Shahid was able to rent space from a community centre in Ilford, on the eastern edge of the British capital, and start running a primary school in an area known for its links to Al Muhajiroun and with a mostly South Asian population.
Anjem Choudhary, a hate preacher and key figure in the development of Al Muhajiroun, lived three streets away before he was jailed in 2015 for inviting support for ISIS.
The group’s co-founder, Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born militant who moved to Britain in the 1980s, preached at the community centre before he was thrown out and later banned from entering Britain in 2005.
“He used this place for his talks,” said Bashir Chaudhary, chairman of the League of British Muslims that runs the centre. “He said something inappropriate for Islamic teaching. I stood up and his followers shouted me down. Eventually we threw him out.”
The group gained notoriety when it tried to organise a conference after the September 11, 2001 attacks, dedicated to the “Magnificent 19” plotters who brought down the World Trade Centre in New York.
Al Muhajiroun’s followers have been linked to terrorist attacks in Britain and abroad, and its leaders have been called inspirations for Britons who went to Syria to join ISIS.
Company documents showed that Mr Shahid, 42, set up an education business two years after the school opened in 2009, with about 50 children aged three to 11. Known as Abu Ibrahim, he led Friday prayers at the community centre, Mr Chaudhary said.
The Dutch national quit as director in March 2014, several weeks before a British newspaper exposed his extremism.
His position as director and proprietor was taken by Sophie Rahman, 42, his wife and the mother of his children, company documents show.
Despite an investigation by the Department for Education, the school was allowed to keep operating. Officials declined to say if they were aware of the
If we’re going to have a joined-up counter-extremist strategy, we need someone in government to get a grip MIKE GAPES Member of Parliament for Ilford
relationship between the couple, and whether it took steps to remove Mr Shahid as proprietor.
Documents suggest that the authorities were told Mr Shahid was a member of Al Muhajiroun before it was banned by the government, when he claimed to have given up his membership.
After he stepped down, he still played a role in its daily affairs, including paying the rent, Mr Chaudhary said. “I thought his objective was to open a school and make money,” he told The National.
“He was getting good money. How he wanted to use that money is another story.
“I later had contact with the security agencies and they told me that he was never convicted but they had suspicions. The checks should have been made by the appropriate regulators.”
Inspectors said the school was inadequate under Ms Rahman’s leadership in 2016 but none of the parents complained, said former councillor Ahmad Warraich, who went to the community centre every Friday.
“I knew everyone and people came to me if they had any concerns,” he said. “Nobody ever contacted me.”
Mr Shahid was also a manager at an Ilford gym that had become a gathering point for extremists, and where he would have known Butt. The three London Bridge terrorists met there before they launched their attack.
In submissions to her disciplinary hearing, Ms Rahman claimed that Butt approached the school and volunteered to run Quranic classes at the school. She denied that her husband had referred Butt but never appeared at her hearing.
Butt taught up to three classes a week in the months before the attack. Pupils reported him as saying that the “worst creatures are the kuffar”, a reference to non-believers, and told the children that it was fine to lie to their parents if there was a “state of war”.
Ms Rahman told education authorities after the June 3 attack that Butt worked at her school, but took 41 days before giving a final list of all the children who attended his classes.
She also failed to tell authorities about her marriage to Mr Shahid and at first suggested that she only knew him from the school.
The school closed its doors for the last time in August last year, its fate sealed before Ms Rahman was struck off because Mr Chaudhary decided to evict the school from the community centre. It still owed rent, he said.
That it took a major terrorist attack to reveal the school’s inner workings pointed to the limits of previous inspections at the school, said experts.
The warning signs were there and officials in 2015 had advised that Britain’s Education Ministry had to be “more vigilant, more inquisitive and have more robust systems in place” to root out school-based extremism.
“We should be mindful that those who inspect our schools must be as savvy as those who seek to abuse those schools to indoctrinate young minds with extremist ideas,” said Emma Webb, who has investigated extremism in schools for the Henry Jackson Society think tank.
“We need to be able to prevent these individuals from accessing young impressionable minds in the first place. If we fail, we will lose a generation to hatred and intolerance.”
The government is now considering changes to the school inspection regime to make it easier for due diligence checks on those seeking to run schools. It currently carries out identity and criminal record checks, and ensures the proprietor is not subject to a ban on working in schools.
“If we’re going to have a joined-up counter-extremist strategy, we need someone in government to get a grip,” Mr Gapes said. “Just because this happened in a school in my constituency doesn’t mean it’s not isolated. There’s a wider issue.”
Ofsted said that it had identified failures at the school in 2016 before improvements were made. But it said that it believed more checks should be made on proprietors of independent schools before they were set up.
The responsibility for those background checks lies with the Education Ministry, it said.
A ministry spokesman said it had recently strengthened its policies and would carry out more detailed checks on people involved in setting up schools.
“No school will be given permission to open if we are not given sufficient assurances that it will provide a suitable education to its pupils,” it said.
Ms Rahman has temporarily moved out of her home in Woodford, East London, and is not expected to return for more than a month, neighbours said.
Mr Shahid collected some items from the house a day before The National called. Calls and emails to her last known addresses were not returned.
The resident at his last address said that police asked him to pass on any mail sent in his name to the property.
He said Mr Shahid had moved about three years ago and his whereabouts were unknown.
“They are gone but we face the music,” Mr Chaudhary said. “We’re still haunted.”