Iran's powerful hardline judiciary hastened to play down a provincial judge's confirmation of a death sentence for blasphemy on dissident academic Hashem Aghajari, saying the verdict was not final.
Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Elham, quoted by the student news agency ISNA, said it was still up to the supreme court to hand down a definitive judgement.
Meanwhile, defense lawyer Saleh Nikbakht said Aghajari has again refused to appeal against the death sentence.
Aghajari had already refused to appeal when the sentence was first pronounced by a judge in the western city of Hamedan for a speech he made critical of Iran's dominant clergy.
"He told me yesterday that he refused to lodge an appeal and forbade me to do it on his behalf," Nikbakht told reporters.
Judicial authorities were seen to be anxious to avoid a repetition of the protests at home and abroad that followed the original death sentence on Aghajari, a disabled war veteran and university teacher, in November 2002.
A court in Hamedan found that Aghajari had committed blasphemy in a speech earlier in the year criticising the power of the dominant Shiite clergy and that, in line with Islamic and Iranian law, deserved to die.
The speech hit at the very core of Iran's 25-year-old Islamic regime, calling for a reformation in the state religion and asserting that Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" religious leaders.
For powerful conservative hardliners, those comments were seen as a frontal assault on the Shiite doctrine of emulation and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's status as supreme guide.
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.
Following demonstrations by students and protests by reformists in the government over the death sentence, Khamenei demanded it be reviewed. In January 2003, the supreme court ordered a retrial.
"The judge has ... maintained his original decision," Zekrollah Ahmadi, the judiciary chief for Hamedan province in western Iran, told AFP on Monday.
"The decision must again be referred to Iran's supreme court," which rejected the earlier condemnation on technical grounds, Ahmadi said, adding that any technical flaws had now been rectified.
Elham said the case would now go back before three judges of the supreme court, whom he described as "experienced".
Reformist President Mohammad Khatami, in an open letter carried by the state news agency IRNA on Monday before the news from Hamedan, had condemned the sentencing of Aghajari.
It is "painful" that an intellectual such as Aghajari who has served the Islamic revolution and who lost a leg during the war against Iraq in the 1980s should be faced with the death sentence, he wrote.
The office of Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi was quick to condemn the Hamedan judge's act.
"In light of the constitution and principles of human rights, it is unacceptable to sentence someone to death merely for expressing an opinion," Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, spokesman for Ebadi's Circle of Defenders of Human Rights, told AFP.
"We hope that the supreme court will annul this verdict which is contrary to the principle of freedom of opinion."
Dadkhah noted that the judiciary had recently issued a series of directives stressing the rights of prisoners and saying that torture and ill-treatment were banned.
"The decision of the Hamedan judge runs counter to this trend," he said.
However, the main reformist student group, the Office for the Consolidation of Unity (OCU), was pessimistic that students would demonstrate as they did in November 2002.
"Given the current torpor in Iran's universities and the lack of interest in politics, for the moment no action is predicted," OCU official Abdollah Momeni said.
Nikbakht said that if Aghajari refuses to appeal, judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi would have to use his authority to ensure this happened.