School suspends 16-year-old for allegedly radicalising Farhad Jabar
Arthur Phillip High School has suspended a 16-year-old boy believed to have been responsible for radicalising Farhad Jabar, the gunman who shot NSW police employee Curtis Cheng dead last week. The school has not expelled the boy but parents haven’t yet been informed of the decision.
Reportedly, Jabar attended a radicalised lunch time prayer group at the Parramatta Mosque and was inducted into it by the 16-year-old boy who had been his classmate for 10 years. The duo diligently attended all the sessions at the mosques. It is also believed that Jabar visited the mosque just before the shooting took place outside NSW police headquarters last Friday, which resulted in the death of Cheng.
Jabar’s classmate also faced charges once last year for driving past a Christian school waving a flag of Islamic State and shouting out death threats. The house in Wentworthville, where the boy lives with his family, has been raided twice in the past year by the NSW police’s counter-terrorism unit.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said that the student has been suspended from the school and the department has been assisting the NSW Police in every possible way it can.
Fairfax Media reported that the classmate is the brother of an 18-year-old boy who is still under the custody of NSW police. The 18-year-old is one of the four suspects who have been arrested on Tuesday by the NSW police during a counter terrorism raid in Sydney. But he still remains in custody, while the others have been released without any charges. The NSW Police suspects that the handgun used by Jabar for the shooting has been sourced from a Middle Eastern dealer by the 18-year-old, which was handed to Jabar at the Parramatta Mosque last Friday before the shooting.
So far the parents of the students have been kept in dark about the developments and the last message they received from the school was on Tuesday, when a 17-year-old was arrested on charges of threatening police.
Following the terror attack of last week, a number of students have come under the attention of the police for allegedly inciting violence on social networking sites as well as for showing support towards the Islamic State through sympathetic posts.
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