Far-right protesters have hung death’s-head images from the doors of an Islamic primary school in Leiden as children returned from the summer holiday.

Teachers arriving at the IBS Er-Risèlèh school on Monday found a bicycle lock had been put on the doors of the building and a note referring to terrorist attacks in Europe. ‘We need to tackle the problem by the roots,’ it said.

The school said it had reported the incident to the police. ‘We have tried to keep it from our pupils, but they could see that they couldn’t get into the bicycle sheds,’ a spokeswoman told Omroep West.

‘We’re deeply shocked by this. You don’t know what’s going on in people’s heads. A lot of our colleagues feel unsafe and we haven’t seen any police checking the area.’

Pegida Nederland posted pictures on Twitter of the incident, which it described as a ‘protest action’ carried out by ‘people from Leiden’.