Amidst reports that the ISIS could have established an extensive network in Kerala, the police have registered a case against a school in Kochi for allegedly teaching students anti-secular and objectionable content.
The school had come under the investigating agencies’ scanner recently while they were conducting a probe regarding the terror outfit’s activities in the State.
The police suspect that the curriculum being followed at Kochi’s Peace International School, run by the Peace Education Foundation whose trustees are said to be influential businessmen, could have been drafted by persons close to controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik. The case was registered under Sections 153A and 34 of the IPC against the school principal, administrators and trustees.
The school and the foundation had come under the agencies’ scanner after it was found that some of the 22 people from Kasaragod and Palakkad districts who had gone missing and were feared to have joined the ISIS in Afghanistan, had connections with it. Though the foundation is running 11 schools in the State, a case has been registered only against the Kochi school.
The case was registered on the basis of a report of the Ernakulam District Education Officer. “The school was following Islamic curriculum and students were being exhorted to lay down their lives for Islam,” a source said.
As per the report, the school has been functioning in Kochi since 2009 without the required Government approval. The Education Officer had compiled the report as per information passed on to the Education Department by Inspector General of Police S Sreejith.
According to the police, Mariyam, a girl from Kochi, who was part of the group that had allegedly joined the ISIS, had worked with the school, which has classes from lKG to Eighth Standard. Mariyam left the country with husband Yahia of Palakkad.
Abdul Rashid Abdullah of Thrikkarippur, Kasaragod, a 29-year-old engineering graduate who was the chief coordinator of the group that had fled India to join the ISIS according to the police and NIA, was associated with the Peace International School in his district. Rashid had left India with his wife Ayesha and kid. Bihar native Yasmin Ahmed, said to be the second wife of Abdul Rashid, had reportedly worked as a teacher at the Peace International School at Kottakkal in Malappuram district three years ago. Yasmin was arrested from Delhi airport early August while preparing to leave for Kabul on Rashid’s instructions.
However, the school authorities who admitted that religious matters were being taught at the school along with the other subjects claimed that there was nothing non-secular about it. They said more than 50 per cent of the teachers in the school were non-Muslims and that Mariyam had not worked at the school though she had attended an interview for a teacher’s post.
Meanwhile, the NIA and the Intelligence agencies say that the ISIS may have a more extensive network in Kerala than they had expected at the beginning of the probe. They now think that the ISIS’s Kerala unit, Ansarul Khilafa, has a well-organised Intelligence system to keep tab on the moves of their opponents.
The NIA had got information regarding this during the interrogation of six operatives of Ansarul Khilafa who were arrested from Kannur and Kozhikode on October 2. According to sources, the arrested persons had told their interrogators that the outfit had a system to monitor the activities of its chief enemy, the RSS.