Iran president orders investigation into sequence of poison assaults at women’ colleges

Iran’s president on Wednesday ordered authorities to research a sequence of incidents by which noxious fumes have sickened college students at women’ colleges, which some officers suspect are assaults concentrating on ladies’s schooling.

Hundreds of women at round 30 colleges have been sickened since November, with some winding up in hospital beds. Officials initially dismissed the incidents, solely acknowledging the scope of the disaster in current days.

Children have complained about complications, coronary heart palpitations, feeling torpid or in any other case unable to maneuver. Some described smelling tangerines, chlorine or cleansing brokers.

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Unlike neighboring Afghanistan, Iran has no historical past of non secular extremists concentrating on women’ schooling. Women and women continued attending faculty even on the peak of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled Iran’s Western-backed monarchy.

At a Cabinet assembly on Wednesday, President Ebrahim Raisi mentioned the Interior Ministry ought to probe the incidents, with assist from the well being and intelligence ministries, and promptly launch the outcomes to the general public, the state-run IRNA information company reported.

It was the primary time he has publicly addressed the poisonings.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi addresses lawmakers in Tehran, Iran, on Jan. 22, 2023. Raisi on March 1, 2023, ordered authorities to research a sequence of incidents by which noxious fumes sickened women whereas they had been attending faculty. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

The evening earlier than the Cabinet assembly, a senior safety official had downplayed the matter, dismissing it as psychological warfare by unnamed enemies of the nation.

“Over 99% of that is brought on by stress, rumor and psychological struggle began significantly by hostile TV channels, to create a troubled and anxious scenario for college kids and their mother and father,” the deputy inside minister, Majid Mirahmadi, advised state TV. “Their aim was to power colleges to shut.”

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The poisonings come at a delicate time for Iran, which has confronted months of nationwide protests since a younger girl died in September after being arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic gown code.

After months of downplaying the poisonings, state-run IRNA filed a number of tales on the topic on Sunday by which officers acknowledged the scope of the incidents.

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Iran’s prosecutor-general has ordered an investigation, saying “there are prospects of deliberate felony acts.” IRNA quoted a deputy well being minister as saying that unnamed folks wished the faculties to shut.

Suspected extremists attacked ladies with acid for not dressing conservatively sufficient across the Iranian metropolis of Isfahan in 2014. But there isn’t any opposition to ladies’s schooling in Shiite Islam, and Iran has even known as on the Taliban in Afghanistan to let ladies and women return to high school.