Bonn Koran school under renewed pressure

2 February 2005

BONN – A Koran school in the German city of Bonn has come under renewed official pressure with the revelation that a staff member’s son-in-law supported al-Qaeda and was planning to blow himself up in a terrorist attack in Iraq.

The infants-to-teens King Fahd Academy narrowly escaped closure last year after education officials discovered teachers were calling for a holy war against Christendom at school assemblies and the children spent more time in indoctrination than on the three Rs.

Though reading, writing and arithmetic were well behind the standard at German state schools, hardline Islamists from around Germany were moving their families to Bonn to enrol children at the school.

Juergen Roters, chief of regional government in Cologne, demanded that the Riyadh-funded school dissociate itself from anybody supporting terrorism after police established that a terror suspect arrested in Bonn last month was married to the teacher’s daughter.

Yasser Abu-Shaweesh, a 31-year-old Bonn medical student, is alleged to have volunteered to perform a suicide bombing in Iraq. He was recruited by a German-based Iraqi militant, who reportedly trained in a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and is also under arrest.

Police say that recently married Abu-Shaweesh was born in Libya but is stateless and carries Egyptian travel documents.

His wife and father in law are both Syrian born.

“Police intelligence gives me grounds for concern that there are links between the Islamist clientele of the King Fahd Academy and the school itself,” said Roters. He demanded the 300-pupil school sack any teachers with pro-terrorism associations.

German intelligence agencies have closely scrutinized the school and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder been to Riyadh to complain to Saudi leaders about it. Government officials only let the school continue so as to avoid a foreign-relations crisis.

DPA

Subject: German news