AFGHANISTAN:AFTA BACHI, Afghanistan – Five young girls slipped briefly into comas and nearly 100 were taken to hospital after a gas attack on their school yesterday, the third in a series of such incidents north of Kabul, Afghan officials said.
The early morning mass-poisoning at Qazaaq school was probably the work of Taliban sympathisers hostile to girls’ education, the head of security for Kapisa province said.
“We don’t think that the Taliban have done this, but the people who collaborate with and support the Taliban have done this,” said Afghan colonel Sha Agha, who is in charge of security for the second district of Kapisa, where the school is located.
The symptoms were the same as those shown by victims of suspected attacks on two girls’ schools in nearby Charikar town. One poisoning took place on Monday and another on April 26th. Scores of pupils were taken ill in each case.
In the latest attack, more than 130 people were affected, with 98 students and six teachers admitted to hospital, said doctor and provincial public health head Wahid Rahim. He said five had slipped into comas but all had been revived. Patients were vomiting, dizzy and some lost consciousness.
“There was a very bad smell in my classroom this morning and the teacher immediately told us to evacuate, but we couldn’t walk to get out of the school, we were very weak, sick and dizzy. When I opened my eyes, we were in hospital,” said 12 year-old Leda.
“I am so sad – what went wrong with our school? I want to study,” the sixth-grader said from her hospital bed in a ward of about 20 pale girls, most with drips in their arms.
Unusually, the three incidents took place in a part of the country that was never under the firm control of the hardline Taliban and kept its girls’ schools open while the austere Islamists ruled most of the country.
Attacks on girls’ schools have increased in the past year, particularly in the Taliban’s eastern and southern heartlands, as an insurgency has gathered strength. When the Taliban was in power in Kabul, it banned women from work and schools.
Last year, a group of schoolgirls in Kandahar had acid thrown in their faces by men who objected to them attending school.
Meanwhile, four suicide bombers blew up near government buildings in the southeastern town of Khost, and militants barricaded themselves inside a building with hostages for hours until Afghan and western troops overpowered them, officials said.
The co-ordinated attacks in Khost formed one of the most brazen raids in recent months, a sign of the violence that Taliban militants have vowed to step up as more US troops deploy to the country over the next few months.
The suicide blasts killed at least six people – four army soldiers and two civilians – and wounded 13, said Hamid Padshah, a doctor from a hospital in Khost. Security sources said apart from the four bombers, three other militants were killed when the building they were barricaded into was stormed.
Yesterday, the Taliban also rejected a US military accusation that the insurgent group was using white phosphorus ammunition. The US military said on Monday it had documented 44 incidents of Afghan insurgents using or possessing white phosphorus ammunition, in response to a Reuters report last week of the first known casualty from the chemical.
US and Nato forces acknowledge they use the chemical, which erupts into flame on contact with the air, but they deny knowingly using it on people. – (Reuters)