More than 100 children are recovering after a gas attack on their school, the third in a series of such incidents north of Kabul, Afghan officials said.


KAPISA, AFGHANISTAN (MAY 12, 2009) REUTERS -
Five young girls slipped briefly into comas and nearly 100 were taken to hospital after a gas attack on their school on Tuesday (May, 12), the third in a series of such incidents north of Kabul, Afghan officials said.
The early morning mass-poisoning at Qazaaq school was likely the work of Taliban sympathisers hostile to girls' education, the head of security for Kapisa province told Reuters.

"When I walked into the hall there was a very bad smell. We immediately told the students to leave their classrooms and go to the garden. When the students came out of their classes suddenly most of them fell over," Mohsina, the principal of Qazaaq school, said.

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 (May 11) and another on April 26. Each of those attacks also made scores of pupils ill.

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.

"We were outside of our classrooms when a little girl fell down and then our teachers told us to go to our classroom," said 12 year-old pupil Leda. She added: "When we entered our classroom there was a bad smell. I did not know what was the smell from. Our teachers told us to leave the classroom, and we rushed towards the garden and in the garden lots of the girls and our teachers fell unconscious."

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.

There have been no clues as to what the gas was in any of the cases or where it came from. Blood samples from the Charikar attacks have been sent to the nearby U.S. Bagram airbase but results have not yet come back.

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 were in power in Kabul they 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.