Poisoning Iranian Student Protesters

"Our past experiences of similar incidents at the Isfahan university negates the authorities’ reason for this mass food poisoning."

"We don’t want rotten food, we don’t want murderous authorities!"

Iranian University students

 

"The university pharmacy is closed, and female students are not allowed at this time [late evening] to leave their dormitories to seek medical care."

"The physician of the university clinic insisted that students had been infected by a foodborne virus they ate outside the university."

Student social media channel 

"Following the cooperation with anti-revolutionary groups in cyberspace to disrupt peace and business of the market, a judicial order was issued to seal Noor Jewellery Gallery [jewellery shop and restaurant belonging to the famous footballer Ali D after he supported protestors' calls for strikes]."

ISNA News Agency

Protesters in Iran and Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei / Reuters and Getty Images

 Video footage posted online over the weekend showed row on row of plastic bags containing canteen food tossed onto the ground outside Ark university, the students accusing the Iranian regime of poisoning students for the purpose of thwarting their participation in the latest scheduled protest against the regime. For their part, authorities have laid the fault of the food poisoning to an outbreak of water-borne bacteria contaminating the universities' canteen food.

The strange thing about it all must be viewed as a peculiar coincidence that the very same thing happened in not one university alone but at several, including Kharazmi university. Students numbering about one thousand, two hundred, became ill, with symptoms of food poisoning such as vomiting, severe body aches and hallucinations. Those were precisely the symptoms seen at another four Iranian universities. 

Those ill students, confined to their dormitories, were in no physical shape to take part in the planned protests. And the authorities behind this clumsy and dangerous scheme to deter them from the protests hide behind protestations of innocence of ill deeds and what they feel is a rational explanation -- wide-scale contamination of university canteen food served to students. A water-borne bacterial infection that restrained itself to universities only.

Confirmation of the students' illness struck by food poisoning was confirmed by the Iranian science ministry. For their part, students protested by dumping their food on the pavement outside the university. Another strange coincidence, with the closing of the universities' clinics, all of which suddenly ran out of electrolytes to treat dehydration, a common symptom of food poisoning.

 

Around 1,200 students were struck down with the mystery illness

 

Female students were instructed to remain in their dormitories at some of the universities. An intensified three-day period of strikes has been called. More mass protests began on Monday, following a state broadcaster denying unconfirmed reports that the regime decided to scrap its 'morality police', the very enforcers who arrested and murdered Mahsa Amini, 22, a Kurdish student whose death set off the entire mass protest movement now roiling the cities of Iran.

"No official in the Islamic Republic of Iran has confirmed the closure of the morality police", reported the Al Alam broadcaster, claiming foreign media had mischaracterized a statement by Iran's attorney general as "the Islamic Republic's withdrawal from its hijab [laws] and influenced the recent riots". What the spokesperson claims to have said was that the unit was 'shut down' and had "nothing to do with the country's judiciary".

While it remains unclear whether in fact the unit had been shuttered, the regime's case claiming that foreign elements hostile to Tehran were implicated in inciting and planning the mass protests by providing false information to Iranians through underhanded means to disrupt normal life and create chaos in the country. And those dastardly foreign intervenors appear to have succeeded.

 

University students refused to eat their lunch in protest to the crackdown on protests