Iran has detained more than 100 people suspected of poisoning thousands of girls at girls’ schools in attacks authorities have blamed on “enemies of the country.”
“More than 100 people have been held responsible for recent incidents at schools,” the Home Office said in a statement issued on Saturday night.
The ministry said some of those arrested “had hostile motives and created fear among the population and students, and caused the closure of schools” to create skepticism towards the Islamic system.
The authorities said they were investigating the link between the alleged attacks and the opposition group in exile Mujahidin al-Khalq (MEK).
The series of poisonings began in late November in Qom. In the last week the cases have increased, but in the last days there have been no new cases.
So far, some 5,000 female students from 230 schools in 25 Iranian provinces have been poisoned, according to data provided by lawmaker Mohammad-Hassan Asafari, a member of a commission investigating poisonings.
The students suffered sore throats, headaches, shortness of breath, weakness, arrhythmias or the inability to move their limbs after inhaling a suspected gas.
The poisonings are fueling popular discontent, especially among parents, over the authorities’ ineffectiveness in combating attacks that appear to have been designed to paralyze girls’ education.
The Iranian Health and Interior Ministries concluded that most of the poisoning cases were caused by “anxiety”.
“Less than 10% of the cases showed real symptoms and most of them are related to anxiety,” said Iranian Deputy Health Minister Saeed Karimi, who is part of the poisoning investigation team.
On Saturday, the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, considered these attacks an “unforgivable crime”, defending that, if proven, the culprits should “receive the final punishment”, which in the country is the death penalty.
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi blamed the poisonings on “the country’s enemies,” a term often used to refer to the United States and Israel.
In the 43 years of the Islamic Republic’s existence, female education has never been questioned in the country and some parents associate the poisonings with the feminist protests that have taken place in recent months.
Female students from colleges and universities participated in these protests, taking off their veils and chanting “woman, life, freedom”, with derogatory gestures before the portraits of Khamenei and the founder of the Islamic Republic, the ‘ayatollah’ Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini.
Source: TSF
