Schools opened by Islamic clerics linked to an Abu Hamza ‘terror’ school that was shut down are still running.
Jameah Islameah was closed ten years ago after a police raid and dire Ofsted inspections.
Set in a Victorian mansion in the East Sussex countryside, it was a suspected jihadi training camp. Now it has emerged that other schools set up by the founders are still operating – and they are trying to reopen Jameah Islameah for pupils aged 11 and up. Hook-handed Hamza – now serving life in a US prison for terror offences – allegedly presided over exercises with AK47 rifles, handguns and a mock rocket launcher. Fellow hate cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed also lectured at camping trips held at the school, where children were taught sick songs praising terrorists, including one that began: ‘Come, mister Taliban, come bomb England.’
After anti-terror police and MI5 swooped in 2006, and following a series of Ofsted inspections, the Government forced the school’s closure in 2007. But now The Mail’s findings highlight how powerless officials are to crack down on breeding grounds for religious intolerance.
The new Education Secretary Damian Hinds signalled a war on illegal schools and out-of-hours tuition centres. The Jameah Islameah former school building has been owned since 1997 by Islamic scholars Bilal Patel, Muhammad Anas and two others.
They are a band of Deobandi Muslims – the strict Islamic movement that gave birth to the Taliban in Afghanistan – and have never given up on their mission to ‘educate’ the next generation of Islamic scholars.
Mr Patel and Mr Anas have been allowed to establish schools elsewhere. A legal loophole means part-time schools are not required to be registered with the Department for Education nor inspected by Ofsted, making it impossible to monitor its curriculum. At Al-Ashraaf, a secondary boys’ school in East London, the chairman Mufti Shah Sadruddin was filmed in 2013 saying all people who insult Islam should be put to death.
