PETALING JAYA, May 5 — The kindergarten at the centre of an online storm over photographs showing plastic gun-toting children in military fatigues has been under police radar since last year.
Bukit Aman Special Branch director Datuk Seri Fuzi Harun confirmed this to Malay Mail yesterday after the photographs shared by lawyer Siti Kassim were widely circulated on social media.
“We have already been investigating the school from last year. If we find enough evidence that suggest such (militant) ideologies are being taught, we will move in on them,” he said when contacted.
Fuzi said police were monitoring kindergartens across the country to ensure they were not being used as training centres for child soldiers.
Checks revealed that several kindergarten teachers, one of whom works in the Kota Damansara kindergarten implicated in the photographs, had uploaded the images onto their Instagram accounts.
Apart from the picture of kids carrying toy guns, another photograph in the collection showed children dressed in full headscarves and holding the Palestinian flag.
In her posting on Facebook, Siti, who is also an activist, alleged that the teachers were from a college in Terengganu, which she claimed was a branch of the Jemaah Islamiyah militant group.
In January, Fuzi had said that police managed to foil an attempt by IS militants to set up a child terrorist training centre locally.
He said, however, there were cases as far back as 2012, where brainwashed parents brought their children along to child terrorist training centres in Syria and Iraq to be indoctrinated.
