Dozens of young girls were poisoned in several schools across Iran on Saturday (April 8th), local media reported, as the country has been rocked for more than four months by a mysterious case of schoolgirl poisoning.
At least “sixty students were poisoned in a girls’ school in Haftkel”, in the province of Khuzestan (in the South-West), let know the press agency Irib News, quoting a local person in charge. Schoolgirls have also been poisoned in “five schools in Ardabil, in the North West”where they presented “symptoms of anxiety, shortness of breath and headaches”, added the same source. In Ouroumieh, capital of the province of Western Azerbaijan (in the North-West), “an indeterminate number” primary school students were also affected “after a gas projection”declared for its part the agency ILNA, without further details.
Since the end of November, many schools, mostly attended by girls, have been affected by sudden poisoning caused by gas or toxic substances, causing faintness and fainting, sometimes followed by hospitalization.
More than 5,000 students poisoned since November
Quoted by state television on Friday, the head of the national fact-finding commission in the case, MP Hamidreza Kazemi, said that the body’s final report would be published. ” in two weeks “. An official report of March 7 reported “more than 5,000 students” intoxicated in more than 230 establishments located in twenty-five provinces, out of the thirty-one in the country.
The intoxications had ceased in early March after the announcement of a hundred arrests and then resumed three weeks later. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on March 6 for “severe penalties”going as far as the death penalty, against the people who would be found responsible for these poisonings.
This case began two months after the beginning of the protest movement sparked by the death, on September 16, of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by the morality police who accused her of having violated the strict dress code imposing in particular on women the wearing of the veil.