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The Iranian government has attributed the attacks to “enemies of the country” and believes that these people have hostile motives to create fear among the population and to close the schools where thousands of girls study. Investigations are advancing with the opposition group Mujahedden e Khalq (MEK) as one of the main suspects.
The Ministry of the Interior of Iran assured that some of the detainees wanted to “create skepticism towards the Islamic system”, that their purpose was to generate chaos in the population and prevent girls and adolescents from attending educational institutions, as published in a statement by the government entity, Saturday night.
The authorities also assured that “some of these cases were pranks”, in the midst of the “psychological atmosphere” that is currently experienced.
Wave of schoolgirl poisonings
After five months these arrests are given to suspects, because At the end of November 2022, the first 18 cases of poisoning among girls began to be reported in the holy city of Qom.
In Ardabil, Tehransar and Tehran, the capital, there were also reports of poisoned students at the end of last year. In some of the institutions, the schoolgirls assured that they suffered “the projection of a kind of spray” with strange odors like rotten fruit.
The students returned home with dizziness, sore throats, headaches, breathing difficulties, arrhythmias, or the inability to move their extremities, after claiming to have inhaled an unpleasant odor.
Since then, there have been a total of 5,000 cases in 230 educational centers, in 25 of the 31 Iranian provinces, data provided by parliamentarian Mohammad-Hassan Safari, member of a commission that investigates poisonings in the country.
In his first public reaction to the events, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, said on March 6 that “the perpetrators must be sentenced to severe punishment. This is a serious and unforgivable crime, there will be no amnesty for them.”
While the president, Ebrahim Raisí, said that the poisonings are caused by “enemies of the country”, explaining that the United States and Israel could be involved.
Social discontent increased as the days went by, the girls’ parents criticized the inefficiency of the authorities in preventing the attacks and condemned the authorities’ delay in identifying those responsible for the attacks.
But beyond the usual accusations against the United States or Israel, the outrage against the government is also based on the fact that its initial reaction was to minimize the poisonings and attribute them to possible carbon monoxide leaks from the heating systems, in addition to labeling the cases from “rumors”“.
“Woman, life and liberty”
Although in the 43 years of existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, female education has not been questioned, there is talk among the population that the poisonings could be related to the demonstrations with a feminist overtone in recent months, the same ones that were later strongly repressed by the authorities, with a balance of 20,000 arrests and more than 500 deaths according to some NGOs.
It is worth remembering that six months ago protests broke out over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who would have been murdered at the hands of the Morale Police for wearing her hijab poorly.
The event caused anger in a large part of the country, women took to the streets shouting “woman, life and freedom”, they removed their headscarves in public and some even cut their hair in an act of complete insubordination towards the strict religious rules.
The students of schools and institutes participated in these protests and showed gestures of contempt for portraits of Khamenei and the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruholá Khomeini.
The demonstrations were established as one of the largest that the Persian nation has had and were replicated in other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, which brought with it the anger of religious extremists.
With EFE.
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