An Athens court banned a comic book portraying Jesus Christ in bad light and sentenced its author to six months in jail for insulting religion, his lawyer said on Thursday.
The book's Austrian author Gerhard Haderer did not attend the trial and the court suspended the sentence, which he would have been able to pay off with a fine had he been in court.
The book's Greek publishers and four local booksellers were acquitted but the court upheld a ban on "The Life of Jesus," which was removed by police from book shops in February 2003 on the orders of the prosecution.
A separate case on the book's seizure is pending in Greece's Supreme Court.
"If the ban is not lifted, we'll consider appealing to the European Court of Human Rights," Haderer's lawyer Minas Mihailovic said.