Iran abolishes 'morality police' after months long protest

Tehran: Iran has scrapped its morality police after more than two months of protests triggered by the arrest of Mahsa Amini for allegedly violating the country's strict female dress code, local media said on Sunday.

Women-led protests, labelled "riots" by the authorities, have swept Iran since the 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin died in custody on September 16, three days after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran.

Demonstrators have burned their mandatory hijab head coverings and shouted anti-government slogans, and since Amini's death, a growing number of women have failed to wear the hijab, particularly in parts of Tehran.

"Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished", Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

His comment came at a religious conference where he responded to a participant who asked "why the morality police were being shut down", the report said.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran's US-backed monarchy, there has been some kind of official monitoring of the strict dress code for both men and women.

But under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the morality police -- known formally as the Gasht-e Ershad or "Guidance Patrol" -- was established to "spread the culture of modesty and hijab".

The units were set up by Iran's Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which is today headed by President Ebrahim Raisi.

They began their patrols in 2006 to enforce the dress code which also requires women to wear long clothes and forbids shorts, ripped jeans and other clothes deemed immodest.

The announcement of the units' abolition came a day after Montazeri said "both parliament and the judiciary are working" on the issue of whether the law requiring women to cover their heads needs to be changed.

Raisi said in televised comments Saturday that Iran's republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched "but there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible".