(Tehran) Three weeks after the last case, a new case of poisoning in a girls’ school in Iran was listed on Tuesday, the day after classes resumed after two weeks of vacation, according to local media.
Twenty students from a school in the city of Tabriz (northwest) were taken to hospital for respiratory problems, the official Irna agency reported.
“Rescue services were dispatched to the scene after a number of students” reported “difficulty breathing,” the city’s emergency chief said.
But, he said, none of them were in serious condition.
Since the end of November, many schools, mostly girls, have been affected by sudden poisoning by gases or toxic substances which have caused fainting and fainting sometimes leading to hospitalization.
In total, authorities have listed “more than 5,000 students” affected in more than 230 schools in 25 of the country’s 31 provinces.
This series ended after the announcement in early March by the authorities of a hundred arrests.
A few days earlier, the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had called for “severe sentences”, going as far as the death penalty, against those who would be found responsible for these poisonings, denouncing “unforgivable crimes”. .
Faced with the multiplication of cases, parents of students and residents had mobilized to express their concern and call on the authorities to act.
The case began two months after the beginning of the protest movement sparked in Iran by the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by the morality police who accused her of having broken the strict dress code imposing in particular on women wearing the veil.