- Demonstrators call for an economic boycott from Monday to Wednesday
- Raisi visits Tehran University on Wednesday for Student Day
- Interior Ministry is silent on the status of the vice squad
DUBAI, December 4 (Portal) – Protesters in Iran on Sunday called for a three-day strike this week, increasing pressure on authorities after the prosecutor said the morality police, whose detention of a young woman sparked months of protests, was dead been closed .
There was no confirmation of the closure by the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of morality police, and Iranian state media said prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was not responsible for overseeing the force.
Top Iranian officials have repeatedly said Tehran will not change the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab policy, which requires women to dress modestly and wear headscarves, despite 11-week protests against strict Islamic regulations.
Hundreds of people were killed in unrest that broke out in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who was arrested by morality police for disobeying hijab rules.
Protesters who want to keep up their challenge to Iran’s spiritual rulers have called for a three-day economic strike and rally on Wednesday in Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) Square, according to individual posts by accounts unconfirmed by Portal were shared on Twitter.
President Ebrahim Raisi will address students in Tehran on the same day to mark Iran’s Student Day.
Similar calls for strikes and mass mobilizations have escalated the unrest that has gripped the country in recent weeks – some of the largest anti-government protests since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Activist news agency HRANA said 470 protesters had been killed as of Saturday, including 64 minors. It said 18,210 demonstrators had been arrested and 61 members of the security forces had been killed.
The State Security Council of Iran’s Interior Ministry on Saturday said the death toll was 200, according to the judicial news agency Mizan.
Residents posting on social media and newspapers such as Shargh Daily say vice squads have been less seen on the streets in recent weeks as authorities appear to be trying to avoid further protests.
On Saturday, Montazeri was quoted by Iran’s semi-official Labor News Agency as saying the morality police had been disbanded.
“The same agency that set up these police closed them down,” he was quoted as saying. He said the morality police are not under the authority of the judiciary, which “continues to monitor behavioral acts at the community level.”
State television Al Alam said foreign media portrayed his comments as “a retreat by the Islamic Republic from its stance on hijab and religious morality in the wake of the protests,” but all that could be understood from his comments was that the vice squad was there not directly related to the judiciary.
executions
According to state media, four men found guilty of collaborating with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency were executed on Sunday.
They had been arrested in June – before the current unrest swept the country – following a collaboration between the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, Tasnim news agency reported.
The Islamic Republic has long accused archenemy Israel of conducting covert operations on its soil. Tehran recently accused Israeli and Western intelligence agencies of planning a civil war in Iran.
The prime minister’s office in Israel, which oversees the Mossad, declined to comment.
Iranian state media reported on Wednesday that the country’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentences against the four men “for the crime of collaborating with the Zionist regime’s intelligence services and for kidnapping.”
Three other people were sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison after being convicted of crimes against national security, aiding and abetting kidnapping and possession of illegal weapons, Mehr news agency said.
Reporting from Dubai Newsroom Editorial staff by Dominic Evans, Raissa Kasolowsky, William Maclean and Susan Fenton
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