More than 100 people have been arrested in Iran on suspicion of large-scale poisoning of girls in schools. International news agencies report this on Sunday. Since November, thousands of Iranian female students have been poisoned at school, probably through the ventilation systems. There were no deaths, but hundreds of victims were hospitalized. It is still unclear which drug was used.
There is a lot of speculation about the reason for the poisonings. According to the Iranian government, the attacks are intended to “instill terror among the people and students, and to close schools”. In Iran, providing education to women is not a controversial policy; since 2011, women are in the majority in universities. The past six months have seen frequent anti-government protests in Iran; women, specifically schoolgirls, are a driving force behind the demonstrations. Those protests flared up again after the series of poisonings.
The government points to the opposition movement the Iranian People’s Mujahideen (MEK) as a possible culprit, although it is certainly doubtful that the movement, which advocates for women’s emancipation and education, would oppose women’s education with such a terrorist attack. The MEK is a resistance movement, labeled a terrorist organization by Tehran, that wants to overthrow the regime of the ayatollahs. The originally Marxist-Islamic organization is in exile and is actively hunted by the Iranian regime.
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