TEHRAN, Feb 6: Iran's hardline judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi has warned that officials who resign with the aim of impeding parliamentary elections in protest at the barring of reformist candidates , face prosecution, state news agency IRNA reported.

"If any of the government bodies impedes the Majlis elections process in violation of legal and religious boundaries, then it would be considered a criminal act and would be prosecuted," Shahrudi was quoted as saying late on Thursday.

It was the latest warning to pro-reformist officials, including dozens of members of parliament, from hard-liners following the disqualification by a conservative vetting body of hundreds of mainly reformist candidates for the Feb 20 elections.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday: "It is the duty of the government to organize the elections and nobody can, in dispute, fail to carry out their legal duty and dispense with their responsibilities."

Such an act would be against the law and prohibited by Islam, he said. Khamenei also ruled it was the pro-reform government's duty to hold parliamentary polls on schedule despite the crisis sparked by the disqualifications ordered by the Guardians Council vetting body.

Reformists had called for a delay in polling after the conservative Guardians Council vetting body ruled out some 2,500 candidates out of 8,000, most of them reformists and including some 80 sitting MPs.

"Those current MPs whose qualifications have been rejected by the Guardians Council are US spies and were implementing US rules instead of Islamic rules," the chief editor of the hard-line Resalaat paper, Mohamad Kazem Anbarloui, told the congregation in a mosque in Iran's clerical capital of Qom on Friday, IRNA said. -AFP