Iran’s president has ordered an investigation after more than 1000 school girls were apparently targeted in mass poisoning attacks.
Dozens of girls from more than 30 schools in Iran are reportedly being treated for poisoning at hospitals after the latest wave of apparent toxic gas attacks.
More than 1000 have been affected since November. They have suffered respiratory problems, nausea, dizziness and fatigue.
“My daughter and two of her friends say they heard something like an explosion and immediately afterwards an unpleasant smell – something like burned plastic filled the air,” one parent of a girl at school in the Tehran suburb of Pardis told the BBC on Tuesday.
“They were asked to leave the class and go into the yard. Many of the students started collapsing in the yard. There are kids with asthma and heart problems in my daughter’s class.”
“Ambulances and the police arrived. Kids were given milk by the ambulance staff.”
Many Iranians suspect the poisonings are a deliberate attempt to force girls’ schools to close. But the government has refused to confirm that they are premeditated.
Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who has been tasked with finding the “root cause” of the poisonings, dismissed as “false” a report by Fars news agency that three people had been arrested.
He also accused foreign-based and “mercenary groups” of taking advantage of the situation to wage psychological war and worry people.
The first cases of mystery poisonings emerged in late November in Qom, 125 kilometres south-west of Tehran. Students at the Noor Yazdanshahr Conservatory fell ill in November, and then again in December.
The BBC said it had verified videos of ambulances arriving at schools and students being treated in hospitals in Tehran, the north-western city of Ardabil and the western city of Kermanshah.
In one from Tehransar, in western Tehran, the BBC said several girls purportedly from 13 Aban School could be seen lying on beds in a hospital ward and receiving oxygen.
Those affected have reported the smell of tangerine or rotten fish before falling ill.
The country’s education minister initially dismissed the reports as “rumours”. But officials eventually began taking the claims seriously.
Iran’s prosecutor-general has ordered an investigation, saying “there are possibilities of deliberate criminal acts”. Iran’s Intelligence Ministry reportedly investigated as well.
On Sunday, there were multiple stories from Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency in which officials acknowledged the scale of the crisis.
“After several poisonings of students in Qom schools, it was found that some people wanted all schools, especially girls’ schools, to be closed,” IRNA quoted Younes Panahi, a deputy health minister, as saying.
On Tuesday, parliamentary education committee chairman Alireza Monadi-Sefidan was quoted by Fars as saying that an investigation had found that the toxic gas contained nitrogen.
However, a government minister said on Wednesday that reports of a specific chemical substance being detected were incorrect.
On Sunday, Deputy Health Minister Younes Panahi said it was “evident that some people wanted all schools, especially girls’ schools, to be closed down”, although he later said that his remarks had been misunderstood.
Some people have speculated that the children were targeted as “payback” for their role in mass protests that erupted late last year after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. She was detained by morality police for allegedly failing to wear her headscarf “properly”.
-with agencies
