Iranian, Afghan FMs discuss border accident

Tehran (IP) - In a phone conversation, Iran and Afghanistan’s foreign ministers discussed investigation on an accident leading to the drowning of a number of Afghan nationals in the Harir Rood joint border river.

Iran PressIran News: In the phone call, Mohammad Javad Zarif and Mohammad Hanif Atmar agreed to dispatch research teams to the place of incident, Iran’s Mashhad, and Afghanistan’s Herat, for conducting a joint investigation.

The goal of the investigation is to find the reasons for the accident and finding practices to prevent such incidents from happening in the future. 

Some Afghan media claimed on May 1, that more than 40 illegal migrants, who have entered Iran for finding a job, were arrested by Iranian border guards and thrown to Harir Rood River from whom a number died.

The claims were abused by some media seeking to tarnish the two countries’ relations.

On May 3, Foreign Ministry spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi rejected any Iranian Border Guard involvement in an incident for afghan migrants and said that the incident happened to a number of Afghan citizens in the border area was on the Afghan side of the border.

Border Guards of the Islamic Republic of Iran have dismissed allegations that Iranian border guard forces detained and tortured illegal Afghan migrants on the Iranian-Afghan border.

Afghanistan shares more than 500 miles 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, after the outbreak of coronavirus, the flow was reversed. Between January and April, about 240,000 Afghans had returned from Iran.

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