Sixty Afghan girls hospitalised after school poisoning
Nearly 60 girls in Afghanistan from two different schools were hospitalised after being poisoned under mysterious circumstances over the weekend, according to police officials in the northern part of the country.
“Some unknown people entered a girl’s school in Sancharak district and poisoned the classes. When the girls come to classes, they got poisoned,” said Sar-e-Pol province’s police spokesperson Den Mohammad Nazari on Monday.
The modus operandi of the poisoning attack is not immediately clear. Officials have not shared details about the toxic substance used in the incident.
No immediate arrests have been made, police officials said.
The school girls were taken to hospital but were in “good condition”, the police spokesperson said.
The poisoning was carried out in two adjacent primary schools targeted one after the other, Mohammad Rahmani, head of the provisional education department, told the Associated Press.
A preliminary probe by authorities shows someone paid a third party to carry out the attack on both schools, the official said.
Girl students from the first to sixth grade were targeted in the attack, according to local reports.
A local education official said the accused who carried out the poisoning attack had a personal grudge, but did not share more details.
The news of the poisoning comes amid an intense crackdown by the Taliban on the education of girls in Afghanistan. Teenage girls above the sixth grade have been banned from attending schools after the militant group took over the nation in August 2021.
Poisoning attacks on girls’ schools in Afghanistan were commonly reported in the US-led administration before the Taliban took over, including suspected gas attacks, but the attacks carried out on Saturday and Sunday are the first of their kind reported in the de facto regime.
Taliban officials have only allowed primary schools to be operational for girls until the age of around 12. They claim they are in favour of women’s education under certain conditions.
Similar attacks have been reported from Afghanistan’s neighbour Iran, where girls’ schools had come under a wave of poisonings.
Thousands of students were left sick due to inhaling toxic fumes in November last year in a mysterious attack in which the chemical used has not been traced.
