More than 60 Afghan schoolgirls were admitted to hospital on Monday with symptoms of poisoning, apparently from a gas, in the second case in the same town in two weeks, officials said. Concerned relatives crowded the hospital in the town of Charikar, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Kabul, after the apparent mass poisoning at the Hora-i-Jalali Girls' High School.
Sixty-one schoolgirls and a teacher were treated for symptoms such as headaches, vomiting and giddiness, said the head of the main hospital, Abdul Jalil Farhangi. Some had been discharged. "I smelt something rather good, like a perfume," one pupil, who gave her name only as Khatera, said from her hospital bed. "I came out of the class and then I collapsed. When I opened my eyes, I was in the hospital," said the girl, aged about 16. Another schoolgirl, Mawloda, also said the smell had been pleasant. She collapsed when she reached home, said the teenager, who had a drip in her arm.
The students had not consumed the same food or water and the chances they had inhaled a poisonous gas were "quite high", Farhangi said. There was however no evidence it was a deliberate attack, he said. Blood samples had been sent to Kabul and to the medical facility of a nearby US military base, said provincial health director Mohammad Qasim Sayedi.