Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/TEHRAN: Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has blamed Tehran’s enemies for poisoning hundreds of schoolgirls in the country.
According to AL Jazeera, the so-far unexplained poison target of over 30 schools in the four cities started in November in Iran’s holy city of Qom, prompting some families to take their children out of school.
Iran’s health minister, Dr Saeid Namaki, said that hundreds of girls in schools had been affected, and few politicians have suggested they could have been hit by religious groups opposed to girls’ education.
Speaking to a crowd in southern Iran on Friday during a speech broadcast live on state television, Raisi blamed the poisoning of the girls on Tehran’s enemies. He said that “this is a security project to cause chaos in Iran whereby the enemy seeks to instill terror and insecurity among students and parents”
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He didn’t say who those enemies were, although Iranian leaders usually accuse the United States and Israel of acting against it. A senior Iranian official said that a fuel tanker found next to the school in a Tehran suburb and which had been spotted in two cities was probably involved in the poisonings. The deputy governor of the Pardis suburb, Reza Karimi, said that authorities seized that tanker and also arrested its driver.
Saleh was the first government official to report the arrest in connection with the wave of poisonings. He said that the same tanker had been to Qom and Borujerd, in Lorestan Province in Iran, where students have suffered from poisoning. He did not elaborate. “Guards at the parking lot where the fuel tanker was parked suffered from poisoning,” Saleh said, referring to the Pardis site.
