Four people were arrested Thursday in Iran after a video emerged showing the attack on a mother outside one of the schools targeted by a poison gas attack, according to local media.
Having gone viral on social media, the video shows a man in civilian clothes violently pulling a mother by grabbing her hair outside a girls’ school in Tehran.
The mother was present there after being informed that students at the establishment had been indisposed by gas fumes, as in several other schools in the country in recent weeks.
AFP was able to verify that this video was filmed in Tehran and posted online on Wednesday, but could not identify the people present in the images.
AFP
After its broadcast, the Minister of the Interior, Ahmad Vahidi, the justice system and the police assured that they were working so that the perpetrator was quickly apprehended.
“Four people were arrested following the incident of the battered woman in front of the Aban 13 school,” the Tasnim news agency then reported, without giving details.
Tehran police had previously claimed that no police officers were “involved, directly or indirectly in this incident”.
The case of the poisoned schoolgirls has been causing a wave of emotion in the country for several days, where the authorities are under pressure to find those responsible.
Several hundred cases of respiratory distress have been recorded since the beginning, in mid-December, of the series of poisonings by toxic gases in at least ten establishments.
They would be the work of individuals wanting to close girls’ schools, according to a government official.
Some students were briefly hospitalized but none were seriously affected, according to the emergency services.
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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Wednesday instructed the Minister of the Interior to “follow the case as soon as possible” and to “inform” the public about the investigation in order to “sweep away the concerns of the families”.
At this stage, no arrests have been announced as part of the investigation.
The release of the video comes nearly six months after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died following her arrest by vice squad who accused her of breaking the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code .