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| Southeast Asia | |
| Cambodia shuts Muslim school | |
| 2003-05-29 | |
| Update on yesterdays story, EFL Cambodian police shut down an Islamic school near the capital on Thursday as part of a crackdown on outside Muslim influences prior to a visit in June by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The closure of the Om Al-Qura Institute and the planned expulsion of 28 overseas Islamic teachers came after an Egyptian and two Thais from the school were charged with suspected links to Southeast Asian Islamic militant group Jemaah Islamiah. Making good on direct orders from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to shut down the school, 40 km (25 miles) east of Phnom Penh, police moved in on Thursday to kick out some 500 students from Cambodia's ethnic Cham Muslim community. Carrying their bags through the steel gates of the school, identified by Cambodian authorities on Wednesday as Al-Mukara, few of the teenage boys had any idea what had happened. "I know nothing. They just told me to take all my luggage and then they came to disperse us," said Mu Sof, 16, who has been at the school for the past four years. Police, some armed with AK-47 assault rifles, made a half-hearted show of searching their bags, which contained everything from clothes to Korans to English-language textbooks. Inside the well-manicured four-hectare (10-acre) complex, complete with two mosques, a basketball court, soccer pitch and classrooms and dormitories, a small bonfire of Arabic papers blazed in the middle of a courtyard. Hello?? That's evidence burning over there, you might want to collect it before, oh, never mind. The school's 28 remaining teachers, from Yemen, Thailand, Sudan and Egypt according to Cambodia's Interior Ministry, have been given until Saturday to leave the country. "I don't know where I will go," said Hassan Mohammed, a bearded and balding 46-year-old Sudanese who said he had been teaching Arabic at the school for the past eight months. "I am very sad for the students and for Muslims in Cambodia." "Now I got to find a new gig."
It's funded by Saudi Arabia, that's what you said yesterday. "We have been investigating with the U.S. since the terrorist attacks in New York," Hun Sen said in a speech broadcast on national radio. "From the investigation with the U.S., we have found out there is a network of terrorists hiding in Cambodia." Cambodia's porous borders and lax law enforcement have led some security analysts to think it would be an obvious hiding place for an Islamic militant cell. However, the authorities vowed to root out alleged extremists. "We are continuing our investigations and cooperation with the U.S. to track down other suspects," an Interior Ministry official told Reuters. "We have a list of their names." Goody | |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 Maybe we should invite the Cambodians over here and we could then shut all the Saudi funded Islamic schools that teach hatred. |
| Posted by: mhw 2003-05-29 12:02:44 |