Since last November, hundreds of girls of approximately 10 years of age who studied in different schools in the holy city of Qom, 150 kilometers south of Tehran (Iran), considered the epicenter of Shiite Islam, have been poisoned by what seems to be noxious gases floating in their classrooms. Some have ended up in the hospital.
“At least 352 schoolchildren, mostly girls,” writes Iran’s opposition outlet IranWire, have been treated in Qom after symptoms such as “nausea, headache, cough, shortness of breath and heart palpitations” appeared. This wave of poisonings, which also affected the town of Borujerd, sparked anger and concern in Qom, where dozens of parents of the victims demonstrated outside the Qom governor’s office on February 14, reports Iran International.
At first, the authorities did not link the cases. It’s winter in Iran, so temperatures often drop below freezing overnight. Many schools are heated by natural gas, which has led to the hypothesis that carbon monoxide poisoning could have occurred.
The education minister initially regarded the reports as “hearsay.” This supposed poisoning could be directed with the desire to close the schools for girls in this country of more than 80 million inhabitants.
Last week, the country’s attorney general, Jafar Montazeri, instructed the Qom judicial authorities to carry out a “special investigation”, the Hamshahri newspaper said. This Sunday, February 26, the Deputy Minister of Health, Younes Panahi, quoted by the ultra-conservative newspaper Javan, declared that these poisonings were caused by “chemical compounds available on the market and not for military use, neither contagious nor transmissible” and that they were ” intentional”.
Jamileh Kadivar, a prominent former reformist lawmaker, warned in Tehran’s Ettelaat newspaper that “subversive opposition” groups could be behind the attacks. However, he also raised the possibility of “domestic extremists” who “seek to replace the Islamic Republic with a Taliban-like Islamic caliphate or emirate.”
He cited an alleged statement by a group calling itself the Fidayeen Velayat which allegedly said: “the study of girls is considered haram (forbidden)” and threatened to “spread the poisoning of girls throughout Iran” if girls’ schools remained open. . Iranian officials have not recognized any group called the Fidayeen Velayat, which roughly translates into English as “Guardianship Devotees.”
The reported attacks come at a sensitive time for Iran, which has already faced months of protests after the September death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police. Authorities have not named any suspects, but the attacks have raised fears that other girls could be poisoned just for wanting an education – something that has never been questioned before in the more than 40 years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran itself he has also called on the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to get girls and women back in school.
