Hundreds of students from girls' schools in the holy city of Qom, in central Iran, have been poisoned in recent months by individuals to force the center to close, according to a health authority quoted by local media.
Since the end of November, the media had reported dozens of cases of respiratory poisoning in Qom schools in girls as young as 10, some of whom had to be hospitalized.
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.
Following the investigation, "Deputy Health Minister Youness Panahi implicitly confirmed that the poisoning of schoolgirls in Qom was intentional," the 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.
The poisoning was caused by "available chemical components and not for military use, it is neither contagious nor transmissible," he added, without further details.
A doctor told the Guardian newspaper that "the most likely cause of this poisoning could be a weak organophosphate agent." In addition, this expert, on condition of anonymity, told the British newspaper that "the motive was to scare protesters inside and outside the country" as well as "to take revenge on the students", who are the ones who started the protests.
This medium tells how these poisonings have caused many girls to stop going to school out of fear.
Iran has been immersed in protests for months since the death on September 16 of the young Mahsa Amini in the custody of the moral police. Located 150 km south of Tehran, the city of Qom is the center of Shia religious studies in Iran.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
