School Fire Kills Three Children, the Nation Mourns

Three children have died and a fourth suffered serious burns in a fire at a school after staff and parents had alerted authorities to potential safety hazards. 

The fire broke out on Tuesday, December 18 at Osveh Hasaneh school in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan, claiming the lives of three schoolchildren. Another child is receiving treatment for severe and excruciating burns. The governor of Sistan and Baluchistan declared a day of mourning in Zahedan on December 19.

The mother of a preschooler at Osveh Haseneh told IranWire the classroom had been like a bomb waiting to go off. “No sane person would have stuffed that substandard room with so many innocent children,” she said. Children from preschool through to primary school grades attend the school.  

Prior to the fire, provincial authorities and representatives of government agencies had been told that the school had failed to meet the required safety standards. Following these reports, however, they did not carry out any inspections on the school. 

The mother we spoke to described how “big shots” wearing “suits and formal outfits milled around and walked over the ashes.” She had rushed to the school as soon as she heard the news of the fire. “If even one of them had inspected the school before this tragedy, they would have seen those narrow and dark hallways, that brown kerosene heater or even that big kerosene can sitting next to flammable curtains and the entirely wooden wall,” she said. 

“The walls of the classroom were all black from the smoke but one corner was still white,”  the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) said in its coverage of the tragedy. “The experts say this is where the children sought shelter and embraced each other [to get away from the fire]” [Persian link].

Shahla, the mother of one of the preschoolers who survived the fire, told IranWire that the fire started soon after the kids started a break. “A student named Saba Arabi went to the classroom to get her food,” she said. “The handle of her bag got entangled with the lighted kerosene burner and the heater, which had not been secured firmly and correctly, was turned upside-down.”

 

The Little Girl Wanted to Save Her Friend

The flames then quickly engulfed the kerosene can and reached the wooden wall and the plastic, flammable curtains. Schoolgirls Saba Arabi, Mona Khosrow-Parast and Maryam Nokandi were trapped in the classroom and took shelter in a corner, waiting to be rescued. “A little girl named Yekta Mir-Shekar, a buddy of Saba, rushed from the hallway to save her friend,” Shahla said.

All four girls were trapped by the flames, but the mothers’ accounts say none of the school staff did anything to save them. The hallway to the classroom was so narrow that it made it difficult to pass through it. The wooden desks caught fire and the flames could be seen burning in the windows. “Eventually the noise coming from the schools [alerted] a shopkeeper in the neighborhood,” Shahla said. “He put himself at risk and pulled the children out from the burning classroom. Perhaps if any one of the school staff had acted earlier, these innocent children would not have lost their lives in pain and horror.”

When the man pulled the children out, none of them were conscious. They were burnt all over their bodies and their clothes had melted and stuck to their skin. “There was not even one fire extinguisher there,” said Shahla, adding that it was near impossible for anyone to do anything. 

Shahla said that, from what she has heard from other parents, Yekta Mir-Shekar’s mother had also lost her life in a fire caused by a kerosene heater. Her grandfather is the neighborhood tailor and a trusted figure among the locals. She and her twin sister were both in the schoolyard when Yekta rushed to the burning classroom to save her friend.

In the early hours after the fire, the news that Mona Khosrow-Parast and Saba Arabi had been burned alive shocked the people of Sistan and Baluchistan province. Then came the news that Maryam Nokandi was alive but had suffered 90 percent burns, leaving her very little chance of survival. Less than a day later, the death of Yekta Mir-Shekar was confirmed. The school has 59 students on its register, but that day two children were absent.

On Wednesday December 19, the governor of the province declared a day of mourning in Zahedan. The prosecutor general of Zahedan said that his deputy and an investigator had gone to the school tasked with looking into what he described as a murder investigation. They confirmed that the principal and the school instructor had been found to be criminally negligent in the performance of their duties. According to him, both have been placed under arrest.

 

Mourning Families

But Shahla said all these measures were too late — they can do nothing to ease the pain of the mourning families. “Time and time again we went to the school principal and warned him about the safety situation of the classrooms,” she said. “We had to register our children in that school. In the province of Sistan and Baluchistan, you do not have many choices.” Osveh Hasaneh is a private school, she said. “We were under the impression that the conditions there were bound to be better than the deplorable situation in government schools. Three better-off parents who had seen the bad safety situation in the classrooms had volunteered to buy standard heaters for the school.”

“Now they have arrested the school principal and have declared a day of mourning,” Shahla said.  “But does this means that tomorrow those children will be back with their parents for dinner? They died in horror and in a horrible manner and the parents will carry this nightmare with them until the end of their lives.”

The media have reported widely on the event, and on the pain of the families, drawing the public’s attention to the substandard safety conditions in schools across Sistan and Baluchistan. Zahedan’s prosecutor general ordered the province’s Welfare Organization and Education Department to shut down substandard schools — but the move comes to late for the children killed in this week’s fire. As reported by the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA), the director of the Education Bureau of Zahedan’s Second District, where Osveh Hasaneh school is located, has announced his resignation to express solidarity with the mourning families [Persian link].

More than Three Million Schoolchildren in Danger

But with the onset of the cold season, the nightmare for rural schoolchildren in the underprivileged areas of Sistan and Baluchistan is just starting. According to the official newspaper Iran, more than 42 percent of the classrooms in schools across the country lack appropriate heating equipment, putting 3.2 million schoolchildren in danger because of substandard heaters [Persian link]. Kerosene heaters have been banned from classrooms but, says the report, 120,000 classrooms still use them.

Gahram Salimi, a contract teacher who runs a primary school in the border rural district of Koohak and Esfandak in the county of Saravan in Sistan and Baluchistan, serves as the school’s principal, teacher and superintendent. He describes the school a a “half-destroyed ruin”. From what he has read about Osveh Hasaneh since the fire, the school is a paradise compared to his — the only difference being that at his school, so far they have been lucky and, as of yet, nobody has died. “Our tiny classroom is heated with a leaky and obsolete heater. Nineteen students from five grades study together in a tiny room with rickety walls and a rickety door, insulated from the cold outside by canvas sheets and sacks.”

While talking to me, he paused for a few seconds, perhaps to visualize the classroom and tell me everything he can about it. “Many times I have noticed that the kids are listless and the air feels heavy,” Salimi said. “I have discovered that the reason is lack of oxygen. There are no chimneys so [as soon as I realized] I immediately pulled aside the curtain to let fresh air back into this mudbrick little room. Our happy days are when we have a reserve of kerosene in the can in the corner. Otherwise, before or after the class, children must gather dry wood from the wilderness around so that if we run out of kerosene we can burn the wood to warm up the room. We are living in prehistoric times.”

Salimi said that many times he has felt that death is hovering over him and his students. “Every day I take their little hands and breathe on them to warm them up. Sometimes I have covered the hands of smaller ones with my gloves or I have covered a thin and frail student who has come to school with only a flimsy shirt in the cold of the mid-winter with my jacket. Closing substandard schoolhouses is only a public relations exercise after the fact. They just want their news [and the answers they give] to calm down the province. It make me laugh when the governor says this and the prosecutor says that. Nobody cares about the children of this province.”

 

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Living on the Margins in Iran: Chabahar and the Province of Sistan and Baluchistan, September 6, 2018

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