President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “moral enforcer”, who led a crackdown on women failing to adhere to Iran’s strict Islamic dress codes, has been arrested in a Tehran brothel.

Brigadier General Ali Reza Zarei the Tehran police chief and a confidant of the president, was said to have been with six prostitutes when he was detained by members of his own force two weeks ago.

He has been removed from his post and put on bail, according to the Iranian Farda website. There has been no mention of the case in the official Iranian media but a spokesman for the justice department admitted last week that an unnamed senior official had been arrested.

The Shahab news site, which is also linked to opponents of Ahmadinejad, said it was believed that up to 60 hours of videotape featuring the general and the prostitutes had been confiscated by his officers.

Zarei - who was in charge of the programme for the “moralisation” of women - now faces possible prosecution.

An Iranian police chief in charge of fighting vice in Tehran was jailed today for reportedly consorting in a brothel.

General Reza Zarei was jailed after being caught with six naked women at a brothel in the Iranian capital.

Ali Reza Jamshidi, a spokesman for Iran's judiciary, confirmed today that Zarei had been taken to jail. He refused to elaborate further about the case. But officials, speaking anonymously, have supported the allegations.

The order to raid the alleged brothel was reportedly given directly by Iran's Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

Zarei was in charge of a program to clean cities from corruption and in recent months had reported arrests of young men and women for illicit relationships and not respecting the Islamic dress code.

Under Iranian law prostitution is punishable by death. But in the past decade, prostitutes are becoming more visible on Iranian streets, mainly due to economic hardships. The rise in prostitution has led to suggestions that brothels be legalised and monitored. Some Iranians say brothels could be run according to Islamic rules, perhaps under the Shiite Muslim tradition which allows men and women to enter into “temporary marriages”, sometimes for less than 24 hours.