United Nations - The Iranian President, Mr Mohammad Khatami, said yesterday the Salman Rushdie affair should be regarded as "completely finished" but the US and Britain reacted cautiously.
Mr Khatami announced no substantive change in Iran's position on the death sentence issued against the British author of The Satanic Verses by the late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.
"We should consider the Salman Rushdie issue as completely finished," he said in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly.