IRAN: Hardliners warned yesterday they would crack down on women who flouted Iran's strict Islamic dress code, which obliges them to cover their hair and disguise their figures.
Conservative president Mahmmoud Ahmadinejad swept to power in June elections with support from conservative clerics and the Basij religious forces, who oppose the relaxing of the dress codes under the last president, Mohammad Khatami.
"Those who violate the Islamic dress code ... should be strongly confronted," Morteza Bakhtiyari, head of the justice department in the northeastern province of Khorasan-e Razavi, said in an Iran newspaper yesterday. Female judges and mobile courts would be used to bring women who flouted Islamic rules into line, he said. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, women who do not cover up face fines, lashes, or even imprisonment.
