Islamic center gets all-clear in south Sacramento after suspicious envelope deemed safe

Students from a south Sacramento Islamic school were briefly evacuated Thursday after a suspicious envelope was found at the adjacent Masjid Annur Islamic Center, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department said.

The envelope was deemed safe and the all-clear was given at 2:15 p.m.

The situation began earlier in the day when mosque officials alerted law enforcement to two suspicious people trespassing on the property, said sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Shaun Hampton. When authorities began searching the complex, they were unable to find the two people believed to be trespassing but came across the envelope deemed suspicious, Hampton said.

As a result, the Al-Arqam Islamic School & College Prep, which shares the property with the mosque on the 6900 block of 65th Street between Stockton Boulevard and Florin Road, was evacuated around 1 p.m.

Students were first evacuated to the Islamic Center’s parking lot and then into the adjacent parking lot of the sheriff’s substation, Al-Arqam teacher Sana Abedrabbo said shortly before the all-clear. This is part of the school’s standard emergency procedure protocol, she said.

Abedrabbo said she did not know anything about the situation that prompted the evacuation at that time, but she said “assumptions were being thrown around left and right.” However, she said it wasn’t an environment of panic, and concern did not start to set in for most until sheriff’s deputies started to show up.

“I think there was more confusion, like, ‘Oh it’s just fire drill,’ ” said Abedrabbo, who has taught at the school for three months.

Hampton said the suspicious item turned out to be “a piece of packaging,” which he later said was an envelope that was “supposed to be there.”

Hampton said bomb-sniffing dogs were called in to inspect the letter and the property, but the envelope was ultimately deemed not to be dangerous. “It’s not something that was just delivered,” he said.

“We don’t believe that there was any credible threat to anybody here at the time,” Hampton said, but the school was evacuated out of an abundance of caution following the reports of trespassers. Hampton added that deputies’ response time was “fairly instantaneous” due to the proximity between the Islamic Center and the deputies’ Florin Station.

This story was originally published April 11, 2019 at 1:38 PM.