Islamic preacher and managing director of Peace International School M M Akbar was arrested in Hyderabad on February 25. Akbar was arrested when he arrived in Hyderabad from Australia en route to Doha. He was scheduled to fly to Doha on Monday. He is being taken to Kerala.
The CPM-led LDF government with Pinarayi Vijayan at the helm had ordered to close down the Peace International School in Kochi last month. The school became the talk of the state when 21 people including, a staff member named Mereen were reported to have left for Syria in 2016 to join the ISIS. Mereen converted to Islam after getting married to a Muslim. Her husband and his brother, both Christians by birth, got converted to Islam. Her brother-in-law got married to a Hindu girl Nimisha of Thiruvananthapuram. Both girls were love-jihad victims. The parents of both girls still live a pathetic life after losing their daughter. Later on, there were reports that one of the two boys died in Syria.
The controversial school is reported to be belonging to the vast anti-national empire of Zakir Naik. In fact, Akbar is known to be Kerala’s Zakir Naik. Out of the 21 missing youths, Abdul Rashid is said to be the ringleader who had worked for the Peace School. His wife Yasmin Ahmad was a teacher in the controversial school. Kerala government started an investigation into the conduct of the school when a lesson of the textbook for Class II was leaked. Investigations proved one RSS-inspired organisation’s allegations that Peace was not following the textbooks of SCERT, NCERT or CBSE but using the books which had nothing to do with the syllabus. They were published by Burooj Realization, an Islamic outfit in Navi-Mumbai. They were obviously meant to radicalize the children of the age of five to thirteen.
After the arrest of three men in connection with this allegation, Burooj Realization had withdrawn the books distributed in all the branches of the schools throughout the country. The questions raised and answered in the books were highly objectionable. ‘Will you give your life for Islam?” How to treat non-Muslims?’ are some examples. The curriculum did not teach anything about India! And, it did not have any room for biology. There is every reason to believe that the institution was a camouflage to recruit Jihadis to join IS in Syria. At least four of the 21 who fled the country to join IS were either employees or frequent visitors to Peace International School in Kochi. When the school hit the headlines, of course, due to the worst sort of reasons, there were 11 teachers for Islamic Study alone; they were from Bihar.
The reports of those days suggested that the police had seized strategic maps of Tehran from the school computer. That is how the investigation officers found that the missing Keralites travelled through Iran and Afghanistan for going to Syria to join IS. The Kerala police had registered the case on the basis of a report by Ernakulam District Education Officer (DEO). The report stated that the lessons in the textbooks followed by Peace School were not ‘secular’. The FIR was submitted before the district magistrate on October 8, 2016. It was registered under Section 153A and 34 of IPC.
Now, since Akbar is in custody, people trust that the crime will be investigated further and the culprits will be brought before the law. They also hope that both Congress-led UDF (opposition) and ruling CPM-led LDF will forget the dangerous vote bank politics for some time and do justice to the country and the people.
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