TEHRAN, Feb 12: Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday Salman Rushdie still faced eventual execution, 16 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed a death sentence on the British novelist.

"Muslims have never accepted insults against their sacred values," the guards said two days before the anniversary of the fatwa, which disrupted Iran's relations with the European Union through the 1990s.

"The day will come when they will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Quran and the Holy Prophet (PBUH)," they said in reference to his book, "The Satanic Verses", which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini's decree.

"The imam's historic fatwa, issued in the days when the infidel leaders who champion liberal democracy and Zionism devoted all their energies to fighting Islam, is testament to Muslim greatness and the revolutionary dynamism of Quranic and Islamic thought."

The guards' comments came a month after Ayatollah Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he still believed the British novelist deserved to die.

"They talk of respect for all religions but they support an apostate worthy of death like Rushdie," Ayatollah Khamenei complained in a message to Iranian pilgrims on Jan 19.

Under reformist President Mohammad Khatami, who was elected in 1997, Iran's leadership distanced itself from the order to kill Salman Rushdie.

In 1998, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi promised his then British Counterpart, Robin Cook, that Iran would do nothing to implement the fatwa, despite a 2.8 million dollar bounty placed on Mr Rushdie's head by a Tehran-based foundation.-AFP