After two months of nationwide anti-hijab protests, Iran finally disbands morality police

After two months of intense protest sparked by the custodial death of a 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini arrested for allegedly violating the country's strict female dress code—headscarf—Iran has finally scrapped its morality police units, its top judicial officer reportedly said.

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

The attorney general made these remarks on Saturday at a religious conference while respondingto a participant who asked "why the morality police were being shut down", the report said.

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

However, he did not specify what could be modified in the law by the two bodies, which are both largely in the hands of conservatives.

The decision also comes in the wake of intense pressure from the opposition parties to abolish the morality police units.

On Saturday, the Union of Islamic Iran People Party, formed by relatives of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, demanded that authorities “prepare the legal elements paving the way for the cancellation of the mandatory hijab law”.

The opposition also called for the Islamic republic to “officially announce the end of the activities of the morality police” and “allow peaceful demonstrations”, it said in a statement.

The "Morality Police" or the Gasht-e Ershad or "Guidance Patrol" has been subject to international sanctions for the crackdown against protesters.It was established during the regime of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to "spread the culture of modesty and hijab". They began patrollingin 2006.

Women protesters have been burningtheir hijab, chopping their hair, shoutinganti-government slogans and tossingturbans off Muslim clerics' headssince Amini's death on September 16.

The crackdown against the protests has grown intense in the past few weeks, with more than 300 people losing their lives, according toIran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The human rights groups, however, peg the number to be higher in the thousands.

The hijab headscarf became mandatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.

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