Girl fostered in Muslim home can rejoin family, judge rules
Court reacts to news reports that raised ‘legitimate public interest’
A GIRL, aged five, who was placed in the foster care of two Muslim households has been reunited with her family after a court ruled she could live with her grandmother.
The child had been placed with a carer who allegedly wears a burka when accompanying her in public.
Crisis-ridden Tower Hamlets council in London had faced criticism after confidential local authority reports suggested one of the girl’s foster carers removed her Christian cross necklace and suggested she should learn Arabic.
At a family court hearing yesterday a judge said it would be in the child’s best interests to live with a member of family who could meet her needs “in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion”, The Times reported.
Judge Khatun Sapnara, herself a Muslim, allowed a reporter to be admitted after security staff initially tried to remove the journalist.
The judge said newspaper reports had raised “very concerning” matters of “legitimate public interest”.
The lawyer representing the council told the court when the girl first became its responsibility there were no white British foster carers available.
The girl will continue to meet regularly with her mother under supervision by council staff until a final arrangement is reached.
Tower Hamlets Council said yesterday it disputed some of the claims in the case – including that the family spoke no English, and it said that the family was of mixed race – but was “legally restricted” from discussing them. A spokesman said the council had “always been working towards the child being looked after by a family member.”
Amid the growing row over the child’s care arrangements, The Daily Telegraph can disclose that an extremist Islamic preacher helped in the recruitment of foster parents. The imam, Shakeel Begg, hosted a workshop for would-be foster carers just months after the High Court ruled him an “extremist Islamic speaker” who had “promoted and encouraged religious violence”.
His mosque, the Lewisham Islamic Centre, was chosen in March as the venue for a workshop “on the importance and need of foster carers in the Muslim community”.
Mr Begg had just a few months earlier lost a High Court libel case against the BBC which accused him of promoting extremism. Mr Justice Haddon-cave, ruling in the BBC’S favour, described Mr Begg as “an extremist Islamic speaker who espouses extremist Islamic positions”.
NRS Foster Care Recruitment, which organised the workshop on behalf of Lewisham council, said it had no idea that Mr Begg was an extremist and said he was not involved. “We have no control over who may or may not be at information sessions,” said a spokesman.
Mr Begg was unavailable for comment yesterday. He has in the past contested the High Court decision.