More than 100 people have been arrested in the mysterious case of poisoning in girls’ schools, which caused great shocks in Iran, the country’s officials said.
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““More than 100 people suspected of being responsible for the incidents at the schools have been identified, arrested and interrogated,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement carried by the official IRNA news agency.
The ministry did not provide details of those arrested in several provinces, including Tehran and Qom in the northwest, East and West Azerbaijan in the northwest, or Kurdistan and Hamadan in the west.
But he notes that some of those “arrested” had “hostile motives” aimed at “creating panic among students and closing schools”. He mentions “possible links with terrorist organizations,” citing the exiled movement People’s Mojahideen (MEK) based in Albania.
“Fortunately, since the middle of last week, the number of incidents has decreased significantly” and “there have been no new cases of sick students,” the press release said.
Since the beginning of the case, at the end of November, several schools, most of them girls, have been suddenly poisoned by gases or poisonous substances, which caused fainting and fainting, sometimes hospitalizing students.
In total, authorities listed “more than 5,000 students” affected in “some 230 schools” in 25 of the country’s 31 provinces.
Faced with the spate of cases, parents of students and residents rallied to express their concern and call on the authorities to take action.
On March 6, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for “severe punishments”, going as far as the death penalty, against those responsible for the poisoning, which he described as “unforgivable crimes”. .
The case began two months after the start of the protest movement in Iran, on September 16, in the death of a young woman named Mahza Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating the strict dress code imposed on particularly clothed women. the veil
