You will have seen the young woman in your newspapers last week, peering balefully from within the regulation chador, making her way home from court — with, I dare say, a good deal of relief.

Parveen Sharif had just been cleared of two serious charges. First, that she had (indirectly) incited her kid brother Omar to commit an act of terrorism, second, that she had failed to disclose to the police that Omar intended to commit an act of terrorism. I suppose if you urged your brother to blow himself up in the service of Allah you would probably be disinclined subsequently to tip off the cops, unless you were of an extremely paradoxical and quixotic frame of mind — but we’ ll let that apparent legal anomaly pass.

Whatever the case, Sharif was found not guilty on both counts represented by Ben Emmerson QC, her eminent human rights lawyer from Matrix Chambers. Omar Sharif and his mate Asil Hanif, by the way, tried to blow themselves up outside a bar in Israel. Both of them are, as a result of their partially botched attempt at martyrdom, dead.

A crucial bit of evidence in Sharif’s trial was an e-mail that she sent to her brother shortly before he strapped on the gelignite. Excerpts from this e-mail were dutifully quoted in the press: “We all have to be firm and focused with reality as time is slipping away and there really is no time to be weak and emotional. Stay focused and determined.” The papers, as one, failed to quote what seemed to me a crucial bit of the e-mail, a sentence which ran directly into the section quoted above, and read: “We are happy that you are focused in your studies.”

The court saw the whole e-mail, heard Sharif insist that she would not dream of telling her bro to kill himself and she was found not guilty.

So, tomorrow morning Sharif may well turn up at a school near you ready to resume her teaching duties. She is a supply teacher or, more accurately, a classroom assistant and had been working in junior schools near the family home in Derby for some time. As everybody I spoke to made clear, she will be welcomed back. “She wasn’t guilty,” came the chorus from her teaching agency, the council, the union.

Well, no, she wasn’t. And as the other charge — of not disclosing — seemed predicated upon the success of the first charge, we should commend the court for ensuring that justice was done.

However, there is the other stuff. What the jury did not hear were comments made by Sharif to a class of young children shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers.

“Hands up everybody who has relatives in New York? Well, they’re dead,” she reportedly announced one morning, making an abrupt change from reading the form register and singing a few verses of All Things Bright and Beautiful. She also reportedly added: “I’m on Osama Bin Laden’s team.” The school at which she was teaching — Grampian primary — received numerous complaints from parents, and Select Education, the agency which had supplied Sharif, was told never to send the woman their way again.

She denied saying the words and the judge ruled them inadmissible, as being based on the uncorroborated evidence of young children.

We may not be certain of the exact words uttered by Sharif, but we know that she was ticked off and agreed her comments had been “inappropriate”. One hopes she agrees it is wrong to exult in mass murder.

It is this business that bothers me. “Parveen’s teaching ability has never been brought into question,” Select Education said at the time. It hasn’t? What precisely would it take a teacher to do in class for such suitability to be questioned then? “Um, that’s a very good question,” a chap from Select told me. “But we would have no option but to let her apply again if she wished to do so. We couldn’t stop her. I mean, ha ha, you can imagine the difficulty we’d have stopping her, couldn’t you? It’s very delicate. It’s a very thin line.”

Yes, I understand all too well, I suspect: delicate, difficult, thin line, etc. Luckily, she has not applied to rejoin Select’s books (she left two or three years ago). “In any case, final responsibility rests with the school,” the chap remarked. But I wonder if it will say on her references “reprimanded for inappropriate comments about the massacre of thousands of innocent people on 9/11”. Hands up everyone who thinks probably not.

Derby city council cannot stop her teaching, either. Sharif was never on the local education authority’s list of supply teachers — but then she did not need to be in order to gain employment. “She came from an agency,” the council told me. “We couldn’t stop her teaching. It’s up to the schools, really.”

Poor schools. I’ll bet they think that the deep vetting is done somewhere else and that it is not up to them. Can you imagine these institutions taking a similarly indulgent view if a teacher had championed paedophilia in the classroom? Or suggested that homosexuals were warped and deviant? Or announced that all Muslims should be banged up? Meanwhile, Sharif has expressed a wish to teach in, or even found, an Islamic school. I don’t suppose anybody will be remotely inclined to stop her.

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