Hundreds of students were hospitalized this Wednesday after being
poisoned in 13 schools in Iran, in the middle of a wave of poisonings in female educational centers in that country.
The president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisí, ordered an investigation on Wednesday to clarify the wave of gas poisonings in these women’s schools.
Meanwhile, public frustration continues to grow, as well as the indications that the cases are part of a series of attempts to keep women out of classes.
What information is known so far?
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The Persian country’s attorney general announced last week that a criminal investigation will be opened. However, he stated that the information available only indicated “the possibility of criminal and premeditated acts.”
For his part, the President of Iran, at the weekly Cabinet meeting, instructed the Interior Minister, Ahmad Vahidí, and the Ministry of Health to investigate “quickly” the causes of the poisonings that are taking place in girls’ schools in the last weeks.
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How are the students being poisoned?
“The students smelled a gas similar to other schools that have suffered from poisoning,” the president of the Ardebil University of Medical Sciences, Ali Mohammadian Erdi, told Shargh.
As in previous cases, they claimed to have perceived a smell between a mixture of rotten orange and cleaning products.
The cases reported this Wednesday are added to another 30 gas poisonings registered in female educational centers since November in the Persian country. The authorities have announced that most of the girls hospitalized on that occasion they were discharged.
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The poisoning is caused by “available chemical components and not for military use, it is neither contagious nor transmissible,” Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said, without adding further details.
When were the first cases reported?
Great efforts are being made to
identify the origin
of the poisonings
from students
He first case of poisoning registered at the end of november in the holy city of Qom, a town that has suffered the greatest number of cases, and in recent weeks they have multiplied in various cities of the country.
Since the end of November, the media had reported dozens of cases of respiratory tract poisoning from girls about 10 years old in the schools of Qom.
Speculation and the lack of official information make it difficult to trace how many minors have been affected by poisoning in dozens of schools in the country. But the BBC, for example, estimates that almost 700 girls have been poisoned with toxic gas since November.
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The parents demonstrated on February 14 before the city government to “demand explanations” from the authorities, according to the official IRNA news agency. The next day, government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi announced that the Intelligence and Education ministries were “cooperating” to find the source of the poisonings.
Thus, several dozen parents shouted “death to the government that murders children” in front of the Yarjani school in Tehran, which experienced a poisoning incident, according to videos shared on networks by the 1500tasvir collective. At the gates of other worried Tehran schools parents they argued with the staff of the centers, according to videos of 1500tasvir.
What does the research say?
The security forces are still unable to find clues and doubt whether they are deliberate attacks or mere accidents. “Great efforts are being made to identify the origin of the student poisonings,” the Persian country’s police chief, Ahmad Reza Radan, told Iranian media. “No one has been arrested so far and we prefer not to judge if it is a deliberate matter,” he added.
The Vice Minister of Health implicitly confirmed that the poisoning
of female students in Qom
it was intentional
On February 15, under pressure from dozens of parents demanding explanations, the government spokesman, Ali Bahadori Jahromi, announced that the Ministries of Intelligence and Education were “cooperating” to find the origin of the poisonings.
As a result of the investigation, “Deputy Health Minister Youness Panahi implicitly confirmed that the poisoning of schoolgirls in Qom was intentional,” the official IRNA news agency announced.
“It has been revealed that certain individuals wanted all schools, particularly girls’ schools, to close,” the official said, without an arrest being announced.
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The discomfort between parents does not stop increasing before the apparent ineffectiveness of the authoritieswho fail to stop these attacks that seem destined to paralyze the education of the students.
A sum of crises and protests in Iran
The recent events denounced in the female schools of the Persian country are not the only ones that have been the object of accusations by the dissatisfied population, as well as organizations and nations at the international level.
The wave of poisonings in girls’ schools comes at a time of great tension in Iran, which has been rocked in recent months by protests over the death of young Mahsa Aminiafter being arrested for not wearing the Islamic veil properly.
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These protests have had a strong feminist component, with many Iranians removing their headscarves, and even burning them.
The protests, however, have lost strength significantly after the executions of four protesters and in recent weeks there have been hardly any mobilizations on the streets of Iran.
Sanctions and international condemnation
The situation in Iran has generated as a consequence a series of sanctions by nations around the world, many are motivated by different reasons.
While countries like Canada do it as a way of showing their discontent with the repression, other governments like the German sanction the Persian country for more specific cases.
multiple US sanctions they prevent Iran from having an economic flow and an adequate commercial exchange. This is because the North American country considers both repressive actions and links with entities considered terrorists to be unacceptable.
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This is the case of February 3, when the United States included the Makran and the Dena in the list of sanctions applied against the Iranian company Paravar Pars, accused of producing and testing drones for the Revolutionary Guard of that country, which is considered by Washington as a terrorist organization.
Besides, a new round of sanctions from the European Union was announced against the Iranian government for the repression of protests since the death in custody, on September 16, of the young Iranian Kurdish Mahsa Amini.
In addition, Berlin announced on February 22 the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats and described as “absolutely unacceptable” the sentence of the Iranian-German dissident, Jamshid Sharmahd, 67 years old.
Iranian justice sentenced Sharmahd to death, who according to his relatives was kidnapped and taken by force to Iran, for his alleged involvement in an attack.
Canada, for its part, announced on Monday a new round of sanctions that affect 12 senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard and the country’s police forces for “gross and systematic violations of human rights”.
The Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, explained in a statement that the new round of sanctions, the ninth imposed by her country since October 2022, is a consequence of the repression undertaken by the Iranian authorities against the population, including actions in Kurdish areas in the west of the country.
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Attempts by the Iranian government to try to ease the sanctions have not borne fruit either. The recent advances in the nuclear program have reopened the debate around reactivating the agreement concluded in 2015 to limit Iran’s atomic activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions; however, these talks are at a standstill.
These negotiations began in April 2021 in Vienna, the headquarters of the IAEA, but are blocked since August 2022, in a context of growing tensions. The 2015 agreement has been in its death throes since the United States withdrew from it in 2018, under the presidency of Donald Trump.
The Islamic Republic has been ignoring various commitments in that agreement ever since.
Santiago Andres Venera Salazar
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
TIME
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