Iran president vows poll will go ahead

But the reformist president stopped short of calling for the postponement of the key February 20 parliamentary poll, the official IRNA news agency said.

Khatami and Mehdi Karubi, the pro-reform speaker of the legislature, wrote to Khamenei to complain that only a few hundred candidates had been reinstated by the Guardians Council in reponse to his call for a second review of the blacklist, IRNA said, citing an "informed source".

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But they vowed that they would nonetheless "organize the elections on the planned date," in line with Khamenei's orders, the news agency said.

IRNA's source said that the pro-reform government had submitted a list of 380 candidates it wanted reinstated, following Khamanei's intervention, but the Guardians Council had approved only 200 of them.

"Most of those reinstated are not leading figures," the source added.

Khatami and Karubi also complained that the Guardians' obduracy would "make the elections less competitive and reduce the people's interest in voting."

The reformists have seen the Guardians Council bar thousands of their candidates from the poll, including some 80 sitting MPs.

They accuse the conservatives of mounting a "coup" to regain control of government and parliament and had called for the elections to be postponed, which Khamenei rejected.

Some 120 MPs, who held a sit-in in parliament, have resigned, along with provincial governors and some ministers and deputy ministers, sparking threats of prosecution from hardliners.

For conservatives, the Guardians Council just did its Islamic, revolutionary and constitutional duty when it disqualified more than 3,000 out of 8,000 prospective candidates for lack of respect for Islam and the constitution.

News of the banning on January 11 provoked what many see as the worst political crisis in the Islamic republic since it was founded in 1979.