Racist graffiti has been removed from the walls of a Muslim school in Toronto’s east end Tuesday morning after a city councillor spotted the hateful messages spray-painted on the brick walls.

“The first thing I thought is ‘I can’t let the kids see this tomorrow morning.’ It’s disgusting. It’s not who we are,” said Glenn De Baeremaeker, councillor for Scarborough Centre, who was out riding his bike when he noticed the red and black spray-painted messages on the exterior walls of Wali ul Asr East Campus on Torrance Road.

“I can’t imagine a 5-year-old or 10-year-old innocent child coming to school and parents having to walk past this type of hateful, racist graffiti,” he said.

A city truck was parked in front of some of the graffiti Tuesday morning to block the words from view as kids were expected to arrive early to school. “They come early to play basketball, they come early to study, they come early because they love school,” De Baeremaeker told CP24. “We’re going to have 250 kids come here this morning. We don’t want them to see that as they walk into school.”

Graffiti spray-painted in black along the brick wall read “expletive U MUSLIMS” before it was washed off by workers operating a pressure washer truck. More graffiti, which crossed out words in red spray paint on a school sign and depicted a middle finger, was still being washed off early Tuesday afternoon.

Officials with Toronto’s 43 Division told CP24 that detectives have been assigned to the case. At the moment, the incident is being investigated as mischief relating to property. The courts would determine whether the act was a hate crime. It’s reportedly the third time the school has been targeted. There are no functioning security cameras at the school and Toronto councillors are now pushing for more money for the school to install new equipment.

“This is not who we are in the City of Toronto,” said Jim Karygiannis, councillor for Scarborough-Agincourt. “This is just one individual — deranged individual — that needs to be charged, and I hope that the full force of the police comes underneath him.”

In a statement on Twitter, Toronto’s mayor John Tory said the “hateful” language has “absolutely no place in Toronto.”

“This hatred is unacceptable at any time but it is disturbing someone would choose to do this during Ramadan,” he said, noting he believes police “will use every effort to track down whoever did this,” an incident that occurred during Ramadan, a Muslim celebration.

With a report from CTV Toronto’s Janice Golding