Starting in November 2022, girls’ schools across Iran were hit by a wave of chemical gas attacks. It went on for months and thousands of girls ended up in hospitals. The regime’s response went from denial, to admitting it was a crime worth the death penalty, to finally declaring that none of it ever happened at all.

Please keep all of the following in mind next time the regime acts like it cares about the Minab schoolgirls. If they ignored their own girls getting poisoned, the Minab girls are just propaganda to them.

Findings:

• It started at a school in Qom in late November 2022, then spread fast. Between November 2022 and March 2023, up to 7,000 schoolgirls were poisoned at dozens of schools in at least 28 of Iran’s 31 provinces. https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2023/mar/08/mass-poisoning-schoolgirls-iran

• UN experts said targeted chemical attacks against girls’ schools were reported in 91 schools across 20 provinces, hospitalizing more than 1,200 schoolgirls. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/03/iran-deliberate-poisoning-schoolgirls-further-evidence-continuous-violence

• At first, officials just lied about what was happening. The government initially dismissed the illnesses as rumors and blamed the girls’ anxiety and underlying health issues, even though the girls reported distinctive smells like citrus or chlorine before falling ill. https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2023/mar/08/mass-poisoning-schoolgirls-iran

• The Washington Post interviewed Iranian doctors who said regime officials instructed them to diagnose poisoning victims with stress instead. https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/iran-update-april-26-2023

• Once it got too big to deny, Khamenei himself called for executions. “If the poisonings are proven, it would be an unforgivable crime … the perpetrators must be handed severe punishments, with no amnesty for them”, Khamenei said. Iran’s judiciary chief said suspects would be charged with “corruption on earth”, a charge that carries the death penalty. https://www.dawn.com/news/1740731

• Despite Khamenei’s own words calling this a proven crime, no one was ever actually convicted or punished for it.
  While girls were being hospitalized, the regime focused its surveillance on the witnesses, not the attackers. A prosecutor announced the arrest of a woman for sending photos of the poisonings to “hostile media”, identified using CCTV cameras (the same surveillance capability the regime apparently could not use to find the people poisoning children). https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/iran-update-april-20-2023

• Journalists covering the story were targeted too. Authorities arrested Qom-based journalist Ali Pourtabatabaei, who had been regularly reporting on the suspected poisonings. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/those-who-poisoned-iranian-schoolgirls-guilty-of-unforgivable-crime-supreme-leader-says

• Children died, and the regime denied even that. An 11-year-old girl, Fatemeh Rezaei, died after activists said she had been poisoned at school, but the islamic republic denied the connection, with her doctor saying on state TV that the cause was an infection. https://observers.france24.com/en/middle-east/20230301-do-not-send-your-children-to-school-iranian-schoolgirls-victim-of-mysterious-poisonings

• The World Health Organization offered to help investigate. The WHO said an expert team was on standby for deployment if the islamic republic requested it, but the regime officials did not respond to the offer. https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/iran-update-april-26-2023

• After months of attacks, hospitalizations, and a Supreme Leader publicly calling it an unforgivable crime, the regime simply reversed course completely. On April 29, 2023, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry concluded the illnesses were not caused by toxic substances at all, but by mass hysteria and malingering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_schoolgirls_mass_poisoning

• The same ministry that decided it was all fake also tried to blame the panic on outsiders. The Intelligence and Security Ministry blamed “mischievous” students using pepper spray and stink bombs for the symptoms, and blamed foreign outlets for spreading hysteria by reporting the incidents as poisonings at all. https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/iran-update-april-28-2023

• Parents weren’t fooled, and neither were analysts tracking the regime’s behavior. Researchers assessed with moderate confidence that the regime was tolerating a coordinated campaign to poison Iranian schoolgirls, noting the regime’s security services have proven more than capable of identifying people when it wants to. https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/iran-update-march-1-2023