NOURNEWS - Mohsen Baharvand Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal Affairs, Seyed Rasoul Mousavi, Assistant Foreign Minister and Border Patrol representative are leaving for Kabul today to investigate the drowning of Afghan migrants.
Iran has documents denying the incident in its territory.
In early May, Afghan news media claimed that people who had allegedly entered Iran illegally from Herat province in Afghanistan and drowned in the Harirod River, claimed that they had been tortured by Iranian border guards and forced to throw themselves into the river.
This issue became the basis of the efforts of the anti-Iranian Persian-language media to destroy the relations between the two nations. About 150 km from the Iranian-Afghan border is the Harirod River, which is dry in the summer and a transit point for migrants, and is flooded in the winter, especially when the dams open. Every year, about 500,000 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan travel to Iran.
The agreement of the border commissioners between Iran and Afghanistan, signed in 1956, is the basis for resolving such issues between the two countries, and the capacities of this agreement have been exploited many times.
Iran has extensive evidence that the incident has not happened on its borders. According to Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, the confirmed reports received from the border guards of the Islamic Republic of Iran show that such an incident has not occurred on the mentioned date and location. He noted that Iran has not been associated with Afghan migrants and the claims of transferring people to camps or inhumane treatment are completely baseless. He added that due to weather conditions of the region, not a single Afghan citizen entered the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran on that date.
Basically, in recent months, due to the coronavirus outbreak and the goal of keeping border guards away from the risk of coronavirus, according to the orders issued by the border guards, Iran has not set up any camps in the border areas and any claims, such as the transfer of Afghan nationals to the camp or their forced labor, and the like, are based on a lie and rooted in falsehood, and the very nature of these allegations is clearly made by those who are unaware of the new situation on the Iranian side of the border.
IRNA