February
27, 2023
An
Iranian deputy minister on Sunday said "some people" were poisoning
schoolgirls in the holy city of Qom with the aim of shutting down education for
girls, state media reported.
Since
late November, hundreds of cases of respiratory poisoning have been reported
among schoolgirls mainly in Qom, south of Tehran, with some needing hospital
treatment.
On
Sunday the deputy health minister, Younes Panahi, implicitly confirmed the
poisonings had been deliberate.
"After
the poisoning of several students in Qom schools, it was found that some people
wanted all schools, especially girls' schools, to be closed," the IRNA
state news agency quoted Panahi as saying.
He
did not elaborate. So far, there have been no arrests linked to the poisonings.
On
February 14, parents of students who had been ill had gathered outside the
city's governorate to "demand an explanation" from the authorities,
IRNA reported.
The
next day government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the intelligence and
education ministries were trying to find the cause of the poisonings.
Last
week, Prosecutor General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri ordered a judicial probe into
the incidents.
The
poisonings come as Iran has been rocked by protests since the death in custody
last year of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, for an alleged violation of
country's strict dress code for women.
Amini's
father said she was beaten by the morality police, the enforcers of those
rules. Her cousin, Erfan Mortezaei, who lives in self-exile in Iraq, believes
she was tortured.
"She
was tortured, according to eyewitnesses," he told CBS News in September.
"She was tortured in the van after her arrest, then tortured at the police
station for half an hour, then hit on her head and she collapsed."
Meanwhile,
Iran's currency fell to a new record low on Sunday, plunging to 600,000 to the
dollar for the first time as the effects of nationwide protests and the
breakdown of the 2015 nuclear deal continued to roil the economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment