The crisis over the alleged gas poisoning of hundreds of girls in Iran has intensified this Sunday after the authorities have recognized that the attacks have affected more than fifty schools in the country. It is not clear either the origin or the responsibility for some incidents that have sown fear among the parents of the minors and are fueling popular discontent at the ineffectiveness of the authorities when it comes to stopping attacks that seem destined to paralyze the education of the students.
Episodes of possible poisoning began to proliferate in November in the holy Shiite city of Qom and this Sunday new cases have been detected. Reports suggest that schools in 21 of Iran's 30 provinces have registered suspected cases, including a children's school. Specifically, more than a thousand poisonings of students have been recorded who claim to have suffered headaches, palpitations, nausea, dizziness and sometimes the inability to move their extremities after perceiving a smell of rotten orange and cleaning products.
The Government of Iran has affirmed this Sunday that the poisonings are a "psychological contamination" operation that aims to revive the protests unleashed by the death in September of Mahsa Amini. In Iran, female education has not been questioned in the 43 years of existence of the Islamic Republic and some parents link the poisonings with the protests with a marked feminist tone in recent months, in which female students from schools and institutes participated by removing their veils, shouting "woman, life, freedom" and pointing to portraits of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi explained yesterday that investigators have collected "suspicious samples" in the course of investigating the incidents, according to the state news agency IRNA. Likewise, he appealed for calm, while accusing the "enemy's media terrorism" of spreading panic.
However, it was not until the international media focused on the problem that the hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, announced an investigation into what happened. Since then, the authorities have detailed that cases had been registered in at least 52 schools.
Videos of upset parents and schoolgirls in emergency rooms with IVs in their arms have flooded social media. However, the case remains an unsolved mystery and coincides with the numerous protests that have taken place in the country since September following the death of Mahsa Amini after his arrest by the moral police. The security forces' crackdown on these protests has led to the deaths of at least 530 people and the arrest of another 19,700, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran.
