A headteacher has been banned from the classroom for allowing one of the London Bridge terrorists to teach an after school class.
Sophie Rahman allowed Khurum Butt to teach children as young as three without doing any background police checks which would have revealed his violent past.
Butt even took a class at Eton Community School, in Ilford, east London, which was known as Ad Deen Primary School, the day before the attack that left eight dead.
Having hired Butt in February last year, she also did not keep track of which kids attended the classes in which children were brainwashed and told to lie to their parents.
The 42-year-old was said to have known about Butt’s terrorist connections because he was friends with members of the extremist jihadist organisation Al-Muhajiroun, run by jailed cleric Anjem Choudary, and appeared on a Channel 4 documentary, ‘The Jihadist Next Door’.
Butt and his two accomplices, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba, ploughed a white van into pedestrians in London Bridge before leaving the vehicle to carrying out a stabbing spree in the nearby Borough Market.
The trio killed eight people and injured 48 before dying in a hail of police bullets on June 3 last year.
It emerged in the months after the attacks Butt had taught at the school, but did not have suitable qualifications or experience to teach Arabic as he could not speak the language himself, had a police caution for violence and gave no references from previous employers.
At a Teaching Regulation Agency hearing in Coventry it emerged Butt was teaching youngsters the day before he launched the group’s atrocities.
Rahman claimed only six children had attended Butt’s after school classes when in fact she knew more children had gone to the lessons on one or more occasions, a teaching disciplinary panel ruled.
Rahman also misled the authorities about her own connections with a former Al-Muhajiroun member, referred to only as ‘Individual S’, who worked at the school, failing to mention that they had children together.
In fact, the hearing concluded that Individual S went to the same gym as Butt and was probably the one who told him of the job going at the school which is why Rahman failed to do the checks.
The panel concluded: “Mr Butt and Individual S were well known to each other.
“The panel regarded it as significant that Ms Rahman chose not to undertake any
enquires into Mr Butt’s employment history despite the fact that he was not suitably
qualified for the role and that he had a conviction for an offence of violence.
“The panel concluded that the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from these facts was that Mr Butt was a person who was known to Ms Rahman or who had been introduced to her by Individual S, the father of her children, who frequented the same gym as Mr Butt.”
When applying for a role as a teacher at another school, the Islamiyah Girls High School in Blackburn, in around January this year, she tried to hide that she was the headteacher at the former Ad Deen school as it had such a bad reputation, claiming she was just an employee.
The discplinary panel found eight of the nine charges against her proven and banned Rahman from teaching indefinitely.
She cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, youth accommodation or children’s home in England and cannot apply to be able to teach again, but can launch an appeal within 28 days.
