Some 450 pupils at Hamd House School in Bordesley Green, Birmingham, were pulled from their end-of-year award celebrations and evacuated onto the street on the last day of term after a school bomb hoax targeted the site. A threatening email, warning of a bomb, had arrived at the private Muslim-ethos secondary school for children aged 11 to 16. West Midlands Police sent officers and sniffer dog units to sweep the building while pupils waited outside, uncertain why their final day of the school year had been interrupted.
Officers found nothing. “Officers attended and were satisfied there wasn’t a credible threat,” West Midlands Police said. The force has logged the bomb warning as a hoax and opened a separate investigation into harassment.
School bomb hoax turned a day meant for celebration into an ordeal Israr Khan, the school’s proprietor, described a day that should have been straightforward disruption turned into fear. “School was full and pupils were celebrating the last day before summer, we were giving out awards,” he said, “and this was hugely disrupting.”
Khan noted an unusual detail: whoever sent the threat copied it to Ofsted, the schools regulator, as well as to the school itself. “At this stage the matter remains an open police investigation,” he said. “The police have logged this incident as harassment.”
Khan also said the school has faced “a number” of recent incidents targeting staff and premises. Reporting so far has not itemised what those earlier incidents involved, when they occurred, or whether each was separately reported to police, and that gap should be acknowledged rather than treated as an established pattern. What is documented is a single, five-day-old hoax that emptied a school rated Outstanding by Ofsted, whose most recent inspection, in June 2025, found the school had strengthened its safeguarding arrangements.
A record year for anti-Muslim hate crime
The hoax lands against a backdrop the Home Office itself has now confirmed in official statistics. Religious hate crimes recorded in England and Wales reached 4,478 in the year to March 2025, including Metropolitan Police figures, or 3,199 excluding them, a rise of 19% on the previous year’s 2,690. Muslims made up 45% of all religious hate crime victims, the largest single group recorded. The Home Office’s own data shows a spike in anti-Muslim hate crime in August 2024, coinciding with the murders in Southport on 29 July that year and the riots that followed.
Set against that record, a bomb hoax against 450 Muslim schoolchildren is not an isolated curiosity. It is one incident inside a documented, worsening pattern that the government’s own statisticians have now put a number on.
Whose safety makes the news
The story was reported by Birmingham Live shortly after it happened, then picked up by Novara Media, The Canary, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, 5Pillars and Shafaqna English over the following days. No BBC, ITV, Sky or Reuters report on the incident could be found. Five days on, no national broadcaster has corrected that gap.
MEND, the Muslim civil-rights monitoring organisation, put the absence in plain terms on its official account: “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 went further on how police have classified the case. “West Midlands Police logged it as ‘harassment’. It should be investigated as a hate crime targeting Muslim children, especially as there had been other recent incidents against staff and the school.” That is MEND’s argument, not a police finding. West Midlands Police’s own statement is procedural: officers attended, found no credible threat, and are investigating a harassment offence. Whether the underlying motive meets the bar for a hate crime is not something the force has yet said publicly, and MEND’s case for it should be read as an attributed demand rather than an established fact.
An uneven response to threat
The gap is visible in funding, too. The government has committed £250 million in new funding to protect Jewish community sites, part of a long-standing response to antisemitic attacks. In the same period, no comparable new funding uplift was announced for Muslim institutions. Existing government-funded protective security for mosques, Muslim faith schools and community centres stands at up to £40 million for 2026-27, itself described by ministers as record funding.
Both figures are real. Muslim institutions face a comparable and rising threat, documented in the government’s own hate crime statistics, without a matching increase in protection.
What happens next
West Midlands Police’s investigation into the harassment offence continues. No arrest has been reported. Ofsted, which received a copy of the same threatening email, has not issued a public statement on the incident.
For now, the only clear demand on record comes from MEND: that the threat against Hamd House School’s pupils be investigated with the seriousness its own statistics say anti-Muslim hate crime now warrants, and that the silence surrounding it be treated as its own story, not an afterthought.
