DUBAI, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Protesters in Iran on Sunday called for a three-day strike this week, ratcheting up pressure on authorities after a public prosecutor said police officers who detained a young woman were morally wrong, ending months of protests. had given birth, was closed. .
There was no confirmation of the closure by the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the morality police, and Iranian state media said Public Prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was not in charge of overseeing the force.
Top Iranian officials have repeatedly said Tehran will not change the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab policy, which requires women to wear modest clothing and headscarves despite 11 weeks of protests against strict Islamic rules.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the unrest that began in September after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was detained by morality police for violating hijab rules.
Protesters seeking to maintain their challenge to Iran’s clerical rule have called for a three-day economic strike and rally in Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) Square on Wednesday, unverified accounts of Reuters shared on Twitter. According to individual posts made.
President Ibrahim Raisi is scheduled to address students in Tehran on the same day, which is on the occasion of Students’ Day in Iran.
Strike action and similar calls for mass mobilization have fueled unrest in recent weeks that has gripped the country – some of the biggest since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. There are counter-demonstrations.
The activist HRANA news agency said 470 protesters had been killed by Saturday, including 64 minors. It said 18,210 protesters were arrested and 61 members of the security forces were killed.
Iran’s Interior Ministry’s State Security Council put the death toll at 200 on Saturday, according to the judiciary’s Mezan news agency.
Residents, posting on social media and in newspapers such as the Sharq Daily, say there have been fewer moral police on the streets in recent weeks as authorities apparently try to avoid provoking more protests.
On Saturday, the semi-official Iranian Labor News Agency quoted Montazari as saying that the morality police had been disbanded.
“The same authority that established this police has shut it down,” he was quoted as saying. The moral police, he said, is not under the authority of the judiciary, which “monitors behavior at the level of society.”
State-run Al-Alam television said foreign media were portraying her comments as “the Islamic Republic’s backtracking on its stance on the hijab and religious morality as a result of the protests,” but Only so much can be understood from. The ethics police was not directly related to the judiciary.
Executions
State media say four people convicted of collaborating with Israel’s spy agency Mossad were executed on Sunday.
He was arrested in June – ahead of ongoing unrest in the country – following cooperation between the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guards, the Tasnim news agency reported.
The Islamic Republic has long accused its arch-enemy Israel of conducting covert operations on its soil. Tehran has recently accused Israel and Western intelligence services of plotting a civil war in Iran.
The Prime Minister’s Office in Israel, which oversees the Mossad, declined to comment.
Iran’s state media reported on Wednesday that the country’s Supreme Court had upheld the death sentences handed down to the four men “for kidnapping and collaborating with the intelligence services of the Zionist regime.”
Three others were sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison after being convicted of crimes including acting against national security, aiding kidnapping and possessing illegal weapons, Mehr news agency said.
Reporting by Dubai Newsroom Editing by Dominic Evans, Raisa Kasulowski, William Maclean and Susan Fenton
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