The country's controversial morality police will be abolished on Saturday, according to local media, amid ongoing nationwide protests.
The morality police had nothing to do with the Judiciary and the same institution that established it has now abolished it, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying at a religious event by the semi-official news agencies ISNA and ILNA, as well as several other media outlets.
Montazeri, who is not responsible for overseeing the morality police in his role as attorney general, said that the judiciary will continue to supervise social behaviors. It was not clear whether he meant that the morality police would be abolished for good or that they would return in some form.
Montazeri made a brief and unscripted comment in response to a question about why the morality police were shut down, according to the outlets.
Iran's interior ministry and police have not commented on the status of the morality police.
State media outlets that attended the event did not report on Montazeri's comments, signaling that they were not sanctioned by the political establishment.
Iran has been gripped by months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old from Iran's Kurdistan region, who died in the hospital three days after she had been detained by the morality police in September.
Amini had allegedly failed to fully cover her hair and defied the country's strict dress codes when she was arrested in Tehran, Iran's capital.
A coroner's report said in October that Amini had died from multiple organ failure and ruled out blows to the head and body as a cause of her death. She died after she fell ill and slipped into a coma, but her family said officers beat her. The police deny this allegation.
After her death, young protesters took to the streets, tearing their hijabs and desecrating symbols of the Islamic Republic. On social media, videos appeared of many of them removing and burning their headscarves and cutting their hair in public, in protest of the cleric-run Islamic Republic.
Demands for women's rights morphed into wider calls to overthrow the regime, posing one of the most serious challenges to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution. Some people have chanted slogans against the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi.
The government blames foreign enemies for stoking the unrest.
A commander of the Air Force's Aerospace Division, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was quoted by a website close to the Guard last month as saying more than 300 people have been killed, including martyrs, an apparent reference to security forces.
Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S. based rights group said in a tweet Saturday that at least 470 protestors have been killed and over 18,000 have been arrested so far.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Iranian women for standing up, speaking up, speaking out for their basic rights, in an interview with NBC News Andrea Mitchell late last month.
The state-run IRNA news agency reported yesterday that authorities executed four people accused of working for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency on Sunday. Three others received lengthy prison sentences.
Members of the network have stolen and destroyed private and public property, kidnapped individuals and interrogated them, according to the report. The alleged spies had weapons and received wages from Mossad in the form of criptocurrency, it said.
IRNA identified executed prisoners as Hossein Ordoukhanzadeh, Shahin Imani Mahmoudabadi, Milad Ashrafi and Manouchehr Shahbandi. Three other members of the group received prison sentences of five to 10 years in prison, the news agency reported.