Swedish authorities have shut down a school in Stockholm after the Swedish security police Säpo produced evidence that the students attending the school were at risk of becoming radicalised as several staff members have ties to Jihadism.
The Swedish Schools Inspectorate revoked a permit for ALM Education, which runs the Cordoba International School, named after the capital of Islamic-ruled Spain according to the school, in the Stockholm suburb of Kista as the newspaper Aftonbladet reports that board members of the company had ties to Islamic extremist groups.
One staff member who worked for a preschool run by ALM Education is even said to have been involved with a terrorist group in the past.
Säpo provided information on the backgrounds of the board members and others but did not clarify which overseas terrorist group the preschool employee was connected to.
“In cases where it is possible, we share information with the relevant authorities, but otherwise, we cannot share more information,” said Karin Lutz, press spokesman for Säpo.
Sweden has seen a number of Islamic State returnees in recent years, most of them women who were being held with their children at the al-Hol prison camp in northern Syria.
Several of the women have been arrested upon their return to Sweden, with one being charged for allegedly forcing her own son to become a child soldier for the terrorist group.
Some reports have even suggested that Islamic State returnees have been recruiting new members for the group in so-called “basement mosques” in cities like multicultural Malmö.
Swedish Minister for Education Lotta Edholm commented on the ALM Education case saying:
Following today’s decision, it feels particularly important that the government has both commissioned the Schools Inspectorate to review schools where there is a risk of extremism and Islamism and that the Schools Inspectorate will receive additional funds as early as next year to strengthen its review. Radical Islamists and terror-related extremists should of course never be given influence over Swedish schools.
ALM Education hit back against the allegations by Säpo, with CEO Ulla Parkkinen stating that they would appeal the decision to close the school and stated:
We don’t know what the information from the Security Service contains, and it is on vague grounds that a school that has been operating for 26 years at Järvafältet is being closed. And that has actively worked against Islamisation, violence, extremism and gang crime.
Over 500 students attend the Cordoba International School, which teaches preschool to grade 9. The school is expected to close on January 8th.
While the school is private, it receives public funding and is one of the estimated 4,000 or so ‘free schools’ that are publicly funded but work as for-profit institutions.
According to the Times, the system of ‘free schools’ has come under fire as they have been accused of profiting from taxpayers’ rather than simply providing alternative education choices.
In one case in 2021, the head of a Muslim school in Gothenburg was accused of scamming taxpayers, shipping millions of Swedish kronor off to his native Somalia, where it then went into the coffers of an Islamist political party. The principal, Abdirizak Waberi, a former MP for the centre-right Moderates, was later charged with embezzlement.
In recent years, some Swedish political parties have suggested shutting down all faith-based schools, not just Islamic schools that may be at risk of radicalising their students.,
Charlie Weimers, a member of the European Parliament for the populist-conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) stated in 2018 that his party favoured a more nuanced approach to the issue.
“What we see now is that the laïcité principle, that all religion should be removed from public space, now getting traction as the most comfortable way of dealing with the ’uncomfortable’ religion of Islam,” he said.
Last year, the former Swedish leftist government proposed a ban on the creation of new faith schools despite all of the problems with radicalisation and issues of gender segregation being entirely found in Islamic schools.