CHICAGO – Prosecutors are expected to present evidence in grand jury indictments against the 75-year-old head of a suburban Chicago Islamic school who is already facing sex abuse charges for an alleged assault on a female employee.

Mohammad Abdullah Saleem was charged last month with one count of criminal sexual abuse of a woman as well as aggravated battery after a former employee and other women allege the conservative Muslim scholar forced himself on them at the Institute of Islamic Education, a boarding school he founded in Elgin, the Chicago Tribune reports.

A total of five women, some of whom were minors during the alleged incidents, have also filed a civil lawsuit against Saleem and the school.

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Yesterday, Assistant State’s Attorney David Shin announced he will present evidence against Saleem to a grand jury later this week, according to the Associated Press.

A 23-year-old former office manager at the Institute of Islamic Education claims in the lawsuit that Saleem’s alleged unwanted advances started shortly after she began work at the school in September 2013. She claims Saleem would stop into her office and ask her to remove her veil to give her hugs, massages and kisses.

The visits allegedly continued into the spring, and culminated in April 2014 when Saleem allegedly forced her to sit on his lap and fondled her, according to the lawsuit.

The woman quit her job, but kept her clothes from the last encounter, which tested positive for semen, though DNA from the clothing has not yet been tested against a DNA swab police took from Saleem’s mouth, the Tribune reports.

“Me and my family were going to keep quiet about it. We just thought it happened to us,” the alleged victim told the news site. “In my culture, if anything happens to an unmarried girl, whether it’s her fault or not, there’s a big scarlet letter on her. We were going to keep it to ourselves.”

The alleged victim worked with Imam Omer Mozaffar, a chaplain at Loyola University Chicago, to solicit an apology from Saleem, but the handwritten note lacked specifics about the encounters. Meanwhile, others heard of the allegations, prompting more alleged victims to come forward.

“Nadiah Mohajir, executive director of Heart Women and Girls, a sexual health advocacy organization for Muslim women, said a Facebook and blog post by Mozaffar reaching out to potential victims triggered a coordinated effort to galvanize those victims and bring the allegations to light,” the Tribune reports.

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It worked.

A woman came forward with allegations that Saleem molested her in 1982 when he taught her about the Quran. That alleged victim, now a 45-year-old mother of two, told the Tribune she managed to convince her mother to pull her from Saleem’s tutelage.

“I thought Allah would take care of it when it happened,” she told the Tribune. “Allah wanted it to come up in this life. He wanted me to have some type of resolution where I could find some peace and put this to end and help other people.”

Another young woman also came forward with allegations of abuse over the last 15 years, alleging in the lawsuit that she notified a teacher at the school, who did nothing.

The female teacher allegedly told the girl, now in her 20s, Saleem is an “old man and old people do things like that, so just forget it,” according to the lawsuit cited by the Tribune.

A male student also spoke out about abuse at the Institute of Islamic Education at the hands of a male staff member that wasn’t Saleem. He alleges in the lawsuit he was molested late at night before crawling through the ceiling tiles to an office to use the phone to call his mother, who picked him up the next day. The school did not take action in that instance, either, the lawsuit alleges.

Saleem was in India when the allegations surfaced, but returned to Chicago to cooperate with investigators. He denies all of the charges, but “out of respect for these questionable allegations, he has reduced his role” at the school, Saleem’s attorney, Raymond Wigell, told the Chicago Daily Herald.

Wigell noted that Saleem has no criminal history and “has shown no indication in his history that he is any danger.”

“Our initial investigation is clear that the advisers to the accusers have motivations that are other than the truth and that will come forward as the case develops,” WIgell told the news site.

Local Islamic leaders, meanwhile, seem to be taking a cautious approach to the allegations.

“This person has been a religious leader and scholar and adviser to many people,” Mohammed Kaiseruddin, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, told the Tribune.

“For a person like that to be alleged to have done things like that, it was a big shock for everybody.”

Kaiseruddin said he met with administrators at the Institute of Islamic Education after the allegations surfaced.

“The community has spent millions of dollars to build up the institution,” he told the Tribune. “The community has the right to protect the institution. We strongly emphasized that they should conduct an independent investigation and find out what went wrong and … establish good policies against abuse.

“Come clean was what our message to them was.”