Senior Iranian cleric, backer of Khomeini, dies

TEHRAN, June 16 (Reuters) Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Fazel-Lankarani, one of Shi'ite Iran's most senior clerics, died today after a period of illness, official media reported, without giving details on the cause of death.

Born in 1931 in the religious city of Qom, he was a supporter of the founder of the Islamic Republic, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the struggle against the US-backed shah.

His official Web site says he was jailed several times before the shah's 1979 overthrow and also spent time in exile inside Iran.

After the revolution, he was a member of the 86-member Assembly of Experts, a clerical body which supervises and can even dismiss Iran's supreme leader.

In 1998, Iranian media said he and two other senior Iranian clerics called on Islamic followers to kill author Salman Rushdie under a death edict which the Iranian government the previous week had disavowed under a deal with Britain.

They said the ''fatwa'', or religious ruling, issued by Khomeini in 1989 for Rushdie's alleged blasphemy of Islam in the novel ''The Satanic Verses'', was irrevocable and it was the duty of Muslims worldwide to carry it out. Khomeini died in 1989.

REUTERS GT MIR RAI2231