Confusion grows over future of Iran's hijab patrols
Comments by Iran’s top prosecutor suggesting that the so-called morality police has been disbanded were rejected by state media.
TEHRAN — Iran's state-run Al-Alam news network on Sunday dismissed reports that the Islamic Republic's controversial morality police, in charge of implementing mandatory hijab rules, has been abolished.
Al-Alam was addressing extensive coverage of remarks by Iran's hard-line Chief Prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, who appeared to suggest that hijab police was no longer operating.
"The morality police has been closed down by the very institution [Interior Ministry] which introduced it," Montazeri had announced at an event in Tehran on Saturday.
Jafari's brief comment was quickly picked up by Western media as a possible sign that the ruling establishment was backtracking on the long-standing and once unchallenged hijab rules, anger over which has thrown the country in a state of deadly unrest for 11 weeks now. The protests erupted on Sept. 16, when Iranian woman Mahsa Amini slipped into a coma and died after her arrest at the hands of a morality police patrol in Tehran.
