The Collège des Bourgmestre et Échevins de la Ville de Bruxelles (responsible for education and local affairs), has decided to temporarily suspend the headmaster of the Institut Anneessens Funck. This is pending resolution of the investigation opened around the communication of information relating to signs of radicalisation on the part of Bilal Hadfi. These were evident in the weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the behaviour of the latter. He was one of the suicide bombers during the Paris attacks, say several sources close to the college. Hadfi blew himself up close to the Stade de France.
The Flemish press reported at the end of December 2015 that the Institut Anneessens-Funck picked up worrying signs of Hadfi's radicalisation in January 2015, and that the headmaster had warned the school authorities on April 27th, of his trip to Syria. The newspaper De Morgen and Het Laaste Nieuws added that the information was not given to the police.
Brussels City Council had immediately denied the information claiming that Hadfi had been struck off the population register more than a month earlier, from March 19th, following leaving for Syria on February 15th. They also said that the headmaster had not alerted the Director General for State Education, that by April 27th, the pupil had not attended school for two months.
According to the Deputy Burgomaster for Public Education, Faouzia Hariche (Socialist Party) this mail from the headmaster was sent in the afternoon by the Public Education department to the City of Brussels Radicalisation Platform, in which all interested stakeholders (Police, State Security, OCAM (the organisation co-ordinating threat analysis) and the Brussels municipal services.
“This case (of Bilal Hadfi) was identified and managed by the public services and it was addressed in a meeting, which the headmaster was alerted to on April 28th, at 8.37am,” the Deputy Burgomaster stressed.
(Source: Belga)
