Iran's hardline judiciary has quashed a death sentence for blasphemy against dissident intellectual Hashem Aghajari, a spokesman announced, in a move that could remove a major source of tension in the Islamic republic.
The spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, confirmed to the student news agency ISNA that the Supreme Court had again scrapped a ruling that had sparked major student protests and badly damaged Iran's image abroad.
Aghajari's defense lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, told AFP that he had yet to be informed of the decision, although the sympathetic Supreme Court ruling has been anticipated for several weeks.
A history professor at Tehran University who lost a leg in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Aghajari was convicted of blasphemy by a judge in the western city of Hamedan in November 2002 after he called for a reformation in Iran's state Shiite Muslim religion.
He had said in a speech to students there that Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" religious leaders.
The speech was taken by the court as an attack on the very core of Iran's 25-year-old Islamic regime, the Shiite concept of emulation and the status of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a supreme leader who cannot be questioned.
The verdict sparked major student protests in Iran as well as complaints from the government of embattled reformist President Mohammad Khatami. Iran also came under some international pressure over the verdict.
Aghajari's case thrust into the spotlight the weakening position of reformists and pro-democracy activists in Iran, highlighting the unforgiving response faced by anyone who dares to cross any of the clerical regime's so-called "red lines".
But the protests over the verdict prompted the intervention of Khamenei, and last year the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, sending the case back to the same judge in Hamedan.
He in turn upheld his original ruling that Aghajari deserved to die, leaving the final decision again in the hands of the Supreme Court.
According to Iranian criminal law, any death sentence has to be given Supreme Court scrutiny regardless of a defendant's refusal to appeal -- a defiant position that Aghajari had taken.
Following the Supreme Court's latest intervention, the case is now expected to go back to another court. According to one report, it will underdo a "full re-examination" in a Tehran tribunal capital, a sign that the death penalty will not be imposed again.
Khamenei has been quoted by a top judiciary official as saying Aghajari's words "cannot be characterised as apostasy and are not liable to the death penalty".
Iran's judiciary -- a bastion of the religious right -- has been thought to be anxious to avoid a repetition of the tense student protests that followed the initial death sentence, and certainly has no desire to make a martyr of such an outspoken critic.
Aghajari was also sentenced to eight years in jail. The term was later commuted to four years before being scrapped on April 14, but he is still being held in Tehran's Evin prison.
His lawyer has asked that Aghajari be freed on bail.