A BELGIAN politician of Moroccan origin who has repeatedly criticised Islamic culture is under police protection after being threatened with “ritual killing”.

Mimount Bousakla, a Socialist senator in Antwerp, whose parents are Muslims from Morocco, reported the threat to the police, who took it seriously after the killing of the film-maker Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam this month.

The case of Ms Bousakla has strong parallels with that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee to the Netherlands and former Muslim who became an MP and is now in hiding after criticising the oppression of women in Islam.

The threats to Ms Bousakla, thought to be from Islamic radicals, are also likely to inflame tensions in Antwerp, the power base of the far-right anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok party, which attracts a quarter of the vote in the multicultural city. The Vlaams Blok, which arose from Nazi collaborators during the Second World War, was last week banned by the Belgian supreme court for falling foul of anti-racism laws despite being the most popular party in the Flemish region.

Ms Bousakla, who keeps her religious beliefs private but is believed to have all but lost her Islamic faith, had dismissed earlier death threats as inconsequential, but she was so alarmed at the weekend that she contacted the police for the first time.

A Socialist party official said: “She again received threats and now has round-the-clock police protection and has gone into hiding.” However, she is still working as normal inside the Flemish parliament.

It is thought that the threats were prompted by her denunciation of Belgian Muslim groups for refusing to criticise the murder of Mr van Gogh. Last week, Ms Bousakla, 32, criticised the Muslim Executive, the official umbrella organisation for Muslims in Belgium, for not condemning the killing.

“The Muslim Executive should have protested in connection with Theo van Gogh’s murder and called on the Muslims in Belgium to criticise the attack on a massive scale. However, it did nothing, and so better disappear,” she said.

Mr van Gogh, a former Socialist who made a film attacking domestic violence against Muslim women, was shot six times and nearly beheaded, and had a declaration of holy war impaled in his chest in broad daylight in Amsterdam on November 2. Many Muslims groups have been hesitant to condemn the murder because Mr van Gogh, a TV celebrity in the Netherlands, was abusive about Muslim extremists and said that it was inevitable that someone would be provoked.

After Mr van Gogh’s murder, police uncovered a suspected network of Islamic radicals conspiring to murder leading “enemies of Islam”.

In the past two weeks, half a dozen Dutch politicians have received death threats by letter, e-mail and telephone. Two went into hiding, including Ms Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, an MP who is seen as the successor to the murdered antiIslamic populist Pim Fortuyn and who was the subject of an internet video promising 72 virgins for any Muslim who decapitated him.

Ms Hirsi Ali, who describes herself as an ex-Muslim, wrote and presented the ten-minute film Submission, directed by Mr van Gogh, which is thought to have prompted his killing. The film criticised domestic violence against Islamic women.

Ms Bousakla has also been critical of conservative and radical elements of Islam. Two years ago, she wrote a book, Couscous with Belgian Fries, about the problems of being brought up between the Moroccan and Belgian cultures, and criticising forced marriages, the place of women in society and the role of men within the family.

She has openly opposed fundamentalist influences in Belgian mosques. She has also attacked Dyab Abou Jahjah, the fiery Lebanese-born leader of the Arab European League, who has been dubbed the “Belgian Malcolm X”.

Ms Bousakla said last year: “He is just a guy from the Middle East who wants to fight the conflict they have there in the streets of Antwerp.”

Mr Abou Jahjah recently announced that he intended to leave Antwerp because of the rapid rise of the Vlaams Blok, whose share of the vote has risen from 10 per cent in 1991 to 24 per cent now, putting it ahead of all other parties.

A Socialist party spokeswoman said that she expected the Vlaams Blok would use the threats to Ms Bousakla to its own advantage. “The Vlaams Blok try and play on everything,” she said.

Last week the Vlaams Blok, which has ten members of the regional parliament, was banned by Belgium’s highest court for inciting racism. Its supporters and workers were threatened with imprisonment. It was immediately disbanded, and then reconstituted under the new name Vlaams Berlang, meaning “Flemish interest”.

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