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Panel on Rushdie's defence closes down

OSLO, Oct 19 (AP) — An international campaign to defend Salman Rushdie said today it was shutting down after nine years because Iran's government no longer supports a death order against the writer.

"The International Rushdie Defence Committee unanimously decided at a closed meeting in Oslo this weekend that its goal had been reached, " the organisation said in a statement.

The campaign consisted of National Rushdie Defence Committees from Britain, the USA, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Iranian villagers offer reward for
killing Rushdie

TEHERAN, Oct 19 (UNI) — Residents of a village in northern Iran have offered land and carpets to anyone who kills British author Salman Rushdie, a newspaper has reported.

The people of Kiapey will give 10 carpets, 4,500 square metres of agricultural land and a house with a 1,500-square-metre garden in their Caspian Sea coastal village to Rushdie's assassin, the Farsi-language paper Kayhan said yesterday.

The move follows the Iranian government's distancing itself last month from bounties offered for the death of Rushdie and a strong reaction by hardliners who support the killing of the Booker Prize-winning author.

The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding spiritual leader of the Islamic republic, condemned Rushdie to death in 1989, ruling that his book, The Satanic Verses, ''blasphemed Islam."

The villagers have also invited the parents of Mustapha Mazeh, who blew himself up while working on a home-made bomb in a London hotel in 1989, to live in Kiapey, which has a population of 2,000 and is near Sari, the capital of Mazandaran province.

Iranians believe Mazeh, a French citizen of Moroccan origin, intended to kill Rushdie, but the British police has dismissed this theory.