7-year-old homeless child in Iran dies after run over by van

NCRI - A seven-year-old homeless Iranian child sleeping rough on the streets was killed and a second child seriously injured when a vehicle accidently drove over a cardboard box under which they were sleeping.

The incident occurred in the city of Mashhad, north-east Iran, last Sunday.

The harrowing incident took place as a Nissan truck driver was driving by and passed over a cardboard box on the side of the road. All of a sudden he heard a cry and stopped the vehicle. As he came out of the truck, he was shocked to see that two children had been asleep in the cardboard box.

Though he immediately contacted emergency services, the first child was not able to be saved due to the gravity of his injuries.

The second child, who is the deceased child’s cousin, is being treated in hospital for serious injuries.

Homeless ‘street children’ are a common sight in Iran.

Homeless women and street children live in dire conditions where they survive in abandoned buildings, containers, automobiles, parks, or even on the street itself.

Street children experience many social and psychological traumas on the streets on a daily basis.

Determining the numbers of street children in Iran is virtually impossible. In a 2005 report by the U.S. State Department, by the Iranian government’s own admission, 60,000 street children were accounted for in Iran.

Numerous child rights organizations suspect that the number is substantially higher, citing figures of 200,000 or more.

"While impoverished Iranian women and children live in such difficult circumstances and lose their lives in such tragedies, the regime has spent an estimated $300 billion on its nuclear weapons program, and plundering astronomical amounts of the nation's wealth has become common practice among the regime's top officials who live a lavish life of luxury," said Shahin Gobadi, spokesperson for the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, PMOI (Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK).

The Iranian regime's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his family have amassed a huge fortune, amounting to billions of dollars, even as the people of Iran including a majority of the working class have been living in poverty and destitution.

Much of Khamenei's personal wealth is in the hands of his sons and daughters, large amounts of which are held in banks in the United Kingdom, Syria and Venezuela. Read the full report here.