TEHRAN (Iran News) – Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi stressed that a recent incident happened to a number of Afghan migrants occurred on Afghanistan’s territory, noting that Iran’s police border guard has denied that the incident took place on Iran’s soil.
Mousavi reacted to some news in Afghan media about a deadly incident that happened to a number of Afghan officials who tried to illegally enter Iran, IRNA reported.
The Afghanistan Foreign Ministry on Saturday said it was investigating allegations that dozens of Afghan migrants detained in Iran were tortured by that country’s border guards and thrown into a river, where many of them drowned, according to Reuters.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman sympathized with the families of the victims of the incident, saying that the incident happened on Afghanistan’s soil.
Iranian police border guard in a statement on Saturday night strongly denied the recent allegations about arrest and torture of illegal Afghan migrants by its forces on the countries’ common border, IRNA reported.
Following the release of a video by anti-revolutionary channels about throwing the Afghan migrants into the river, Iran’s police border guard immediately launched an investigation, the police statement said.
According to the police’s investigation, such an incident did not happen on the neighbors’ common border and is not true, the statement added.
The Iranian Consulate in the Afghan city of Herat also in a statement on Saturday denied the allegations, saying, “Iranian border guards have not arrested any Afghan citizens”, according to Reuters.
Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry in a statement on Saturday said an inquiry had been launched into the incident.
Up to 2,000 Afghans daily cross the border from Iran into Herat.
Afghanistan shares more than 750 kilometers of border with Iran. About three million Afghans – a mix of refugees and illegal migrants – live in Iran, a large number of them having arrived after their country plunged into conflict in the 1980s.
Young Afghans constantly flow across the border to seek work, many of them smuggled through dangerous deserts, often traveling for a week at a time packed into the back of pick-up trucks.
In recent months, the flow was reversed due to the coronavirus outbreak in Iran. Between January and April, about 240,000 Afghans had returned from Iran.
- source : Iran Daily, Irannews
