A month and a half after the death of 18 Afghan illegal migrants caused on 1er May by the violent intervention of Iranian border guards, the tension between Iran and Afghanistan does not drop. New incidents have even fueled the anger of an Afghan population who accuse Tehran of ill-treatment and discrimination. A feeling further aggravated by the announcement on June 17 of the attempted self-immolation, in May in Mashhad (city in eastern Iran), of the son of the great specialist of Persian literature, Najib Mayel Heravi, a Afghan living in Iran for half a century. He wanted to denounce Tehran's broken promise to grant Iranian nationality to his father.
If the Iranian authorities specified on Thursday June 18 that the situation of Mr. Mayel Heravi would soon be resolved, they reject the accusations made by Kabul concerning the death on 1er May, migrants in a border river. The world was able to reach a migrant survivor of the tragedy that night in the province of Herat (eastern Afghanistan) by telephone.
On April 30, 14-year-old Mahmoud (the name has been changed), smuggled across the border with around 50 people. "We were arrested trying to pass under the barbed wires, he explains. Then we were detained in a small room of a gendarmerie in Iran. We could barely breathe and it was very hot. "
Taken to the Hari Rûd river
The next day, according to his statements, confirmed by testimony gathered by local Afghan media, these migrants were forced by Iranian police to collect the trash and mow the weeds of the land around the gendarmerie. Then they were taken by car to the edge of the Hari Rûd river, which forms the northern border between the two countries.
"The guards chose a place where the water was deep and the current strong. Even a tall man couldn't keep his head above water if he couldn't swim, says Mahmoud, who wanted to join one of his brothers in Iran. Like almost everyone else in the group, I couldn't swim. I was among the last to be pushed into the river. " That night, he was saved by a comrade who managed to hang on to tall plants that had grown in the middle of the river. Like other survivors, he said he was previously beaten by Iranian border guards.
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