DUBAI: Iranian teachers held protests in several cities on Tuesday over suspected poisonings targeting hundreds of schoolgirls. Security forces broke up several of the demonstrations using water cannons and tear gas, activists said.
Meanwhile, prosecutors started filing criminal charges against journalists, activists and others over their comments on the still-unsolved incidents that began in November and escalated in recent days, with dozens of schools reporting suspected cases.
The alleged poisonings come as Iran has faced months of protests over the September death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country’s morality police, one of the most-serious challenges to Iran’s theocracy since its 1979 Islamic Revolution. These new incidents threaten to again stoke public anger as parents fear for their children’s safety. It remains unclear who may be behind the suspected attacks and what chemicals — if any — have been used.
At least 127 schools have reported suspected poisoning cases so far, according to figures compiled by the Tehran-based reformist newspaper Etemad, with dozens reported on one recent day alone. Nearly every school reporting an incident has been a girls’ school.
Activists and Iranian media reports previously have said that over 1,000 students complained of falling ill with at least 400 of them hospitalized. Iranian authorities have offered no exact figures since the crisis began.
However, Mohammed Hassan Asefari, a prominent Iranian lawmaker who is on a panel investigating the incidents and has close ties to security forces, told the semiofficial ISNA news agency that as many as 5,000 students have complained of being sickened in 230 schools across 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces. No other official or media report has offered figures that high so far.
On Tuesday, online videos and photos purportedly showed teachers demonstrating in a number of Iranian cities, including Ahvaz, Isfahan, Karaj, Mashhad, Rasht, Sanandaj, Saqqez and Shiraz.
Others showed anti-riot police on streets, with some police officers surrounding those demonstrating in Isfahan. Activists identifying themselves as belonging to Iran’s Coordinating Council of Teachers Syndicates said police used pepper spray, water cannons and force to disperse protesters in Mashhad, Rasht and Saqqez.
Iranian state media made no mention of Tuesday’s demonstrations or of security forces dispersing demonstrators. Teachers have been targeted by security forces and faced arrests for months over protesting in support of their long-standing demands for salary increases amid the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial.
Protesters and others have raised the possibility that religious extremists may be targeting schoolgirls to stop them from receiving educations. Attacks on women have happened in the past in Iran, most recently with a wave of acid attacks in 2014 around Isfahan, at the time believed to have been carried out by hard-liners targeting women for how they dressed. But even in the chaos surrounding the Islamic Revolution, no one targeted schoolgirls for attending classes.
Iran itself also has been calling on the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to have girls and women return to school.
Determining what’s going on in Iran has been difficult. Authorities have detained nearly 100 journalists since the start of the protests in September over the death of the 22-year-old Amini, detained allegedly because of how she was dressed. The targeting of journalists has escalated in recent days amid their reports on the suspected poisonings.
Tehran chief prosecutor Ali Salehi said authorities began filing charges against journalists, including editors at the reformist newspapers Hammihan and Shargh, which have led reporting on the suspected poisonings. A news site, activists and others also face charges over allegedly spreading “unreal claims and totally false” statements about the attacks, Salehi said, according to the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency.
Salehi sought to justify the cases by saying those charged jeopardized the “psychological security” of Iran’s citizens.
Iran’s government, while initially ignoring reports of alleged poisonings back in November, has faced increasing pressure from the public to respond. On Monday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said any culprits connected to the alleged poisonings should be sentenced to death for committing an “unforgivable crime.”
Deputy Interior Minister Majid Mirahmadi told Iranian state television Tuesday that authorities have arrested an unspecified number of suspects over the poisoning incidents. However, officials have made claims about arrests previously that were later denied.
As Iran struggles to respond, international pressure is growing on Tehran to investigate. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday called for a “credible, independent investigation” into the incidents by the United Nations.
“If these poisonings are related to participation in protests, then it is well within (the) mandate of the UN independent international fact-finding mission on Iran to investigate,” she said. Iran hasn’t acknowledged asking for outside help and has described some of the recent incidents as episodes of “hysteria.”
The World Health Organization documented a similar phenomenon in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012, when hundreds of girls across the country complained of strange smells and poisoning. No evidence was found to support the suspicions, and WHO said it appeared to be a “mass psychogenic illness.”
Teachers protest over suspected Iran schoolgirl poisonings
https://arab.news/9ybvk
Teachers protest over suspected Iran schoolgirl poisonings
Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, a haven for journalists during Lebanon’s civil war, shuts down
- The hotel, located in Beirut’s Hamra district, shut down over the weekend
- Officials have not commented on the decision
BEIRUT: During Lebanon’s civil war, the Commodore Hotel in western Beirut’s Hamra district became iconic among the foreign press corps.
For many, it served as an unofficial newsroom where they could file dispatches even when communications systems were down elsewhere. Armed guards at the door provided some sense of protection as sniper fights and shelling were turning the cosmopolitan city to rubble.
The hotel even had its own much-loved mascot: a cheeky parrot at the bar.
The Commodore endured for decades after the 15-year civil war ended in 1990 — until this week, when it closed for good.
The main gate of the nine-story hotel with more than 200 rooms was shuttered Monday. Officials at the Commodore refused to speak to the media about the decision to close.
Although the country’s economy is beginning to recover from a protracted financial crisis that began in 2019, tensions in the region and the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war that was halted by a tenuous ceasefire in November 2024 are keeping many tourists away. Lengthy daily electricity cuts force businesses to rely on expensive private generators.
The Commodore is not the first of the crisis-battered country’s once-bustling hotels to shut down in recent years.
But for journalists who lived, worked and filed their dispatches there, its demise hits particularly hard.
“The Commodore was a hub of information — various guerrilla leaders, diplomats, spies and of course scores of journalists circled the bars, cafes and lounges,” said Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent who covered the civil war. “On one occasion (late Palestinian leader) Yasser Arafat himself dropped in to sip coffee with” with the hotel manager’s father, he recalled.
A line to the outside world
At the height of the civil war, when telecommunications were dysfunctional and much of Beirut was cut off from the outside world, it was at the Commodore where journalists found land lines and Telex machines that always worked to send reports to their media organizations around the globe.
Across the front office desk in the wide lobby of the Commodore, there were two teleprinters that carried reports of The Associated Press and Reuters news agencies.
“The Commodore had a certain seedy charm. The rooms were basic, the mattresses lumpy and the meal fare wasn’t spectacular,” said Robert H. Reid, the AP’s former Middle East regional editor, who was among the AP journalists who covered the war. The hotel was across the street from the international agency’s Middle East head office at the time.
“The friendly staff and the camaraderie among the journalist-guests made the Commodore seem more like a social club where you could unwind after a day in one of the world’s most dangerous cities,” Reid said.
Llewellyn remembers that the hotel manager at the time, Yusuf Nazzal, told him in the late 1970s “that it was I who had given him the idea” to open such a hotel in a war zone.
Llewellyn said that during a long chat with Nazzal on a near-empty Middle East Airlines Jumbo flight from London to Beirut in the fall of 1975, he told him that there should be a hotel that would make sure journalists had good communications, “a street-wise and well-connected staff running the desks, the phones, the teletypes.”
During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a nearly three-month siege of West Beirut by Israeli troops, journalists used the roof of the hotel to film fighter jets striking the city.
The parrot at the bar
One of the best-known characters at the Commodore was Coco the parrot, who was always in a cage near the bar. Patrons were often startled by what they thought was the whiz of an incoming shell, only to discover that it was Coco who made the sound.
AP’s chief Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson was a regular at the hotel before he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held for seven years, becoming one of the longest-held American hostages in history.
Videos of Anderson released by his kidnappers later showed him wearing a white T-shirt with the words “Hotel Commodore Lebanon.”
With the kidnapping of Anderson and other Western journalists, many foreign media workers left the predominantly-Muslim western part of Beirut, and after that the hotel lost its status as a safe haven for foreign journalists.
Ahmad Shbaro, who worked at different departments of the hotel until 1988, said the main reason behind the Commodore’s success was the presence of armed guards that made journalists feel secure in the middle of Beirut’s chaos as well as functioning telecommunications.
He added that the hotel also offered financial facilities for journalists who ran out of money. They would borrow money from Nazzal and their companies could pay him back by depositing money in his bank account in London.
Shbaro remembers a terrifying day in the late 1970s when the area of the hotel was heavily shelled and two rooms at the Commodore were hit.
“The hotel was full and all of us, staffers and journalists, spent the night at Le Casbah,” a famous nightclub in the basement of the building, he said.
In quieter times, journalists used to spend the night partying by the pool.
“It was a lifeline for the international media in West Beirut, where journalists filed, ate, drank, slept, and hid from air raids, shelling, and other violence,” said former AP correspondent Scheherezade Faramarzi. “It gained both fame and notoriety,” she said, speaking from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The hotel was built in 1943 and kept functioning until 1987 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between Shiite and Druze militiamen at the time. The old Commodore building was later demolished and a new structure was build with an annex and officially opened again for the public in 1996.
But Coco the parrot was no longer at the bar. The bird went missing during the 1987 fighting. Shbaro said it is believed he was taken by one of the gunmen who stormed the hotel.
