NOS News••Amended
In a suburb of the Iranian capital Tehran, 35 schoolgirls have been taken to hospital with symptoms of poisoning. There have been similar incidents elsewhere in Iran recently. It is suspected that this is intentional: the perpetrators would like to force girls’ schools to close their doors.
Stories about the poisonings had been appearing in local media for some time. Went earlier this month according to the BBC in the city of Qom, at least a hundred people took to the streets to demand safety for their daughters from the authorities.
Earlier this month, schoolgirls from Qom were already in hospital due to poisoning:
Iranian schoolgirls poisoned: ‘Can’t walk anymore’
Last week, the Iranian authorities issued a statement about the matter. The Ministry of Health announced that since November girls have been poisoned through the air circulation system in several schools.
Nauseous and dizzy
The incidents mainly took place in and around Qom, a holy city for Shia Muslims. Dozens of schools were said to have been affected, with hundreds of victims, mostly aged about 10. The girls became nauseous, dizzy and had trouble breathing. There were no fatalities, but several girls were hospitalized.
Iran’s deputy health minister said on Sunday that it had been established that “certain figures want schools to close, especially girls’ schools”. However, he later said that his words had been misunderstood. However, the public prosecutor announced that he had launched an investigation. Suspects are not yet in the picture.
According to the reformist Iranian newspaper Shargh, the intimidation through the air circulation systems is having an effect. Several parents in Qom are said to have already taken their children out of school.
Embarrassed
In recent decades, girls’ education has hardly been a point of discussion in Iran, as is the case in neighboring Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Iran is a country with a strict Islamic regime, where extreme fundamentalists have a big finger in the pie.
The incidents therefore embarrass the Iranian authorities. According to the BBC, the contradictory statements by the deputy health minister indicate that the regime is concerned about a possible new popular anger after the massive anti-regime protests by Iranian standards in the last months of last year.
Those demonstrations, which began in September after the death of an Iranian-Kurdish woman following her arrest, were harshly crushed by the regime. Activists say hundreds were killed and at least 20,000 people were detained.
