MONTREAL, Canada – A Canadian university canceled a contract to rent space to a Muslim professor after six students left the country to fight with the Islamic State.

Montreal’s College de Maisonneuve suspended a rental agreement with Adil Charkoui on Thursday after learning one of his students was among six who recently left the country to join forces with ISIS.

Charkaoui is “the leader of a Montreal Islamic centre who spent six years under security certificates after police alleged he was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent,” The Globe and Mail reports.

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The security restrictions were lifted in 2009, but college officials believe that videos Charkaoui produced through the Islamic centre “Ecole Les Compagnons” features others express views “contrary to the school’s values,” college spokeswoman Brigitte Desjardins said.

“When people rent out our facilities, we don’t ask them if they plan on spreading hate messages,” Desjardins told news site.

It’s unclear whether Charkaoui or Ecole Les Compagnons influenced students to take up arms with ISIS, but Desjardins said the college will “interrupt the contract we have with this organization until we have more information,” CNN reports.

College officials also sent alerts to students and staff Thursday in an effort to prevent more students from joining ISIS. To aid in that effort, public safety minister Steven Blaney believes lawmakers must pass Bill C-51, which would allow police more flexibility to thwart ISIS recruits by engaging their family members, The Globe and Mail reports.

“We are reducing the margin of manoeuvre (for) those who want to lure, to prey on those individuals and to radicalize them,” Blaney said.

“While the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says up to 145 Canadians have gone abroad to join terrorist groups, including an estimated 40 who have joined Islamic State, the addition of six would-be fighters at once represents a stunning new level of recruitment in Canada,” according to the news site.

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CNN reports at least three of the suspected student defectors attended the College de Maisonneuve, at least two are women, and one a man, though few other details are clear. Canadian authorities believe the teenagers flew from Montreal to Turkey in mid-January, though their current location is unknown, CNN reports.

“We’ve been informed about three yesterday and in fact, those three names — they were students in our college for the last [semester], but not this [semester],” Desjardins told CBC.

“The disappearances are the latest example of a troubling trend for Western authorities: a steady flow of young Muslims born or raised in the West, lured to Iraq and Syria by slick propaganda churned out by the Islamist group,” according to CNN.

“Some 3,400 Westerners have gone to fight for ISIS, Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in recent U.S. congressional testimony.”

Syed Soharwardy, founder of Muslims Against Terrorism, wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn about the recent ISIS recruits from Canada. Like Blaney, he believes Canada needs stricter laws to prevent ISIS from recruiting the country’s youth.

“And I have been saying it for a long time that there is a recruitment which is going on in this country by physical people who are walking on the streets of Canada,” he told CTV.

Students, on the other hand, couldn’t believe their classmates would turn their backs on their country to join Muslim extremists.

“It’s shocking, I don’t understand how this could happen,” one student told CBC.

“It just makes us think, what were they thinking?” another added.