The Birmingham City Council knew about the Trojan Horse plot which saw the infiltration of several schools' teaching by Islamic state radicals, announced investigation leader Peter Clarke. He told the Sunday Telegraph: 'very late in my inquiry, my team found an email buried in a mass of documentation submitted by the council which showed they had known about it all along.' He described the conduct of the council who had denied their knowledge to him and associate Ian Kershaw at several points during the inquiry, as 'extraordinary.'
'Despite all the interviews that both I and Ian Kershaw had with officials, none of them at any time made reference to that earlier correspondence,' Clarke said. What is more suspicious is that the investigator was originally discouraged from probing further into case. He said that parts of Whitehall had tried to 'intimidate' him out of the inquiry despite evidence and instinct that was indicating otherwise: 'What I put in my report was the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge amount of material which I didn’t put in. I deliberately focused on what appeared to be the epicentre. There were problems elsewhere which I couldn’t evidence sufficiently in the time available.' This was part-way in response to the Nicky Morgan, the new Education Secretary who assured that 'ministers had gotten to the bottom of the issue.'
Clarke said: 'You’ve got to look at the roles of Birmingham city council and the unions and you’ve got to see where else Tahir Alam [the alleged ringleader] had influence.' Another worrying discrepancy was England's largest teacher's union pushing a single teacher to take the fall for the infiltration being overlooked. Chris Keates, the NASUWT’s general secretary threatened to sue Mr Bains former head teacher of Saltley School, one of the key target institutions of the subversive Jihadist plotters, unless he signed a statement that absolved the union of any culpability.
In light of Clarke's comments an authority spokesman said: 'Both Peter Clarke’s and Ian Kershaw’s full reports have been received, and both have fed into a strategic action plan which is being overseen by the Education Commissioner, Sir Mike Tomlinson.'
