On the last day of the 2023-2024 academic year, a prominent Muslim-faith private school in Birmingham, United Kingdom, was forced to evacuate all 450 of its 11 to 16-year-old students following a emailed bomb threat that disrupted planned end-of-term celebrations, local media has confirmed.
Hamd House School, an institution rated “Outstanding” and lauded as “highly inclusive” by education regulator Ofsted, received the threatening email early Tuesday morning, with a copy of the message also sent directly to Ofsted itself. The threat came as students and staff gathered to distribute annual academic awards and mark the start of summer break with a day of community-focused festivities, turning a joyful annual tradition into an emergency scenario.
Israr Khan, the school’s proprietor, told local outlet Birmingham Live that the incident caused significant unnecessary disruption to a day meant for celebration. “School was full and pupils were celebrating the last day before summer, we were giving out awards and having a day of celebration and fun on this special day, and this was hugely disrupting,” Khan said.
Emergency response teams from West Midlands Police, including canine units trained to detect explosive materials, were dispatched immediately to sweep the entire school campus. After a thorough search of the grounds and buildings, authorities cleared the school as safe and lifted the evacuation order.
Khan told reporters that the school appears to have been deliberately targeted, noting that this bomb threat is not an isolated event: the institution and its staff have faced a string of separate hostile incidents in recent weeks. He added that law enforcement has formally logged the incident as harassment, with an active investigation still ongoing. “The matter remains an open police investigation. An unusual and bizarre quirk to this situation is that the threat was also sent to Ofsted. The police have logged this incident as harassment,” Khan said, confirming that the school would continue full cooperation with investigating authorities.
Neither West Midlands Police nor Hamd House School has issued additional public statements beyond the initial details shared by Khan, despite requests for comment from independent outlet Middle East Eye.
The incident has drawn sharp criticism from the anti-Islamophobia NGO Mend, which says there has been widespread “near silence” from mainstream media and political leaders over the threat against the Muslim-majority school. In a post on social platform X, the organization questioned the double standard in how such incidents are covered and prioritized: “Ask yourself what the reaction would be if 450 children at any other school were threatened this way. The quiet tells you something about whose safety is treated as a story and whose is treated as background noise.”
Mend has called for authorities to reclassify the investigation as a hate crime probe, arguing the threat intentionally targeted Muslim children against a backdrop of rising anti-Muslim hostility in the UK, consistent with the pattern of earlier incidents against the school and its staff.