A school has been left reeling after one of its sixth form students was feared to have fled to Syria to join Islamic State terrorists.
Talha Asmal, 17, was studying ICT and business at Mirfield Free Grammar School.
They have not been heard from since and their families called in West Yorkshire Police.
The North East Counter Terrorism Unit has joined in the search with agencies overseas.
Mirfield head teacher Lorraine Barker said the whole school was shocked and hoping for the safe return of Talha.
“It was a huge shock that he has gone missing,” she said. “Our sympathies go out to his family.”
Mrs Barker described Talha as a “quiet and hard-working” student and said what happened came completely out of the blue.
Hassan Munshi, an apprentice, is the brother of Hammaad Munshi, Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist.
His grandfather is Sheikh Yakub Munshi, a renowned Islamic scholar who set up Dewsbury’s first Sharia court.
Both boys were said to have attended the Zakaria Mosque in Savile Town until they were about 15.
Farooq Yunus, an imam at the mosque, said he believed the whole community had failed the two teenagers.
He added: “Society has failed these two children and somehow we should put things in place where if they do feel strongly, they know what to do.”
Former Dewsbury Labour MP Shahid Malik, a close friend of the Munshi family, said relatives were shocked and distraught.
Mr Malik wrote a letter of support for the Munshi family which was handed to the Old Bailey judge who sentenced Hammaad, then 18, to two years in a young offenders’ institution for terrorism offences.
A junior government minister at the time in 2008, Mr Malik said then that parents and mosques needed to do more to combat radicalisation.
He described it as a “wake-up call for parents.”
