Poison gas used on girls school, Afghan official says

KABUL, Afghanistan — Blood tests have confirmed that cases of mass sickness at girls schools across the country over the past two years were caused by a powerful poison gas, an Afghan official said Tuesday.

Ministry of Public Health spokesman Dr. Kargar Norughli said his ministry and the World Health Organization had been testing the blood of victims in 10 mass sickenings and had confirmed the presence of toxic but not fatal levels of organophosphates.

Those compounds are widely used in insecticides and herbicides, and they are also the active ingredients of compounds developed in the past as chemical weapons, including sarin and VX gas.

He said how the gas was delivered — and even whether the poisonings were deliberate — remained a mystery. There have been no fatalities, and no one has claimed responsibility for the episodes.

Many local officials had dismissed the cases as episodes of hysteria provoked by acid and arson attacks on schoolgirls by Taliban fighters and others who objected to their education. But the cases have been reported only in girls schools, or in mixed schools during hours set aside only for girls.

The blood samples taken in the past week from victims in the two new cases — from 119 girls and four teachers at two schools in Kabul — are still being analyzed, Norughli said, but their symptoms were similar to those in the 10 cases where the poisonings were confirmed.

In all, 45 students and four teachers Saturday were taken to the local hospital, the Rahman Mina Clinic, according to the clinic's deputy director, Dr. Rahmatullah Hafizi. Three days earlier, he said, the clinic received 74 students from another girls school, the Totya High School, in the same part of the city, with the same problems.

With varying degrees of severity, the victims displayed classic symptoms of organophosphate poisoning, as described by Hafizi and other doctors who treated them. In addition, Hafizi said, many of the girls were severely short of breath, and the sickest had cyanosis, where skin color turns bluish from oxygen deprivation.

All were treated with oxygen and intravenous drips and released without staying overnight.

The gassings mostly occurred in areas of the country with large Pashtun populations, where opposition to girls' education has been stronger than elsewhere. The Kart-e-Naw part of the city, where the schools in the newest cases are, is a heavily Pashtun quarter.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Education, Gul Agha Ahmadi, said 60 schools had been burned down or destroyed so far this year. Cases where acid is thrown on female students are frequent in the south and occasionally even in Kabul.