HTML comments inside script problem

The following code is from a theme I bought, which has a wrong html comment of the type <– –> inside a tag script:

<script>
<!–pass images–>
var theme_directory = “”;
…rest of code
</script>

chrome ignores this comment and does not report it as an error.

but when autoptimize removes the HTML comments within the <script></script> tags, the following error is generated:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
<script>
pass images–>
var theme_directory = “”;
…rest of code
</script>

Is it correct, that autooptimize within the scope of a script removes code independent of whether it is badly coded? should not leave intact the code that goes inside the tag <script></script>, because that code is interpreted by the JS engine and not by the explorer’s graphic part.

Thank you.