The advertisement appeared in the Etelaat and Gods newspapers to promote the foundation's new industrial and development projects being inaugurated today, the birthday of the Islamic republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

They featured a photograph of foundation director Ayatollah Hassan Sanei and called him the man with ``responsibility for paying the reward for the death of apostate Salman Rushdie on behalf of Khordad-15 as called for by Imam Khomeini''.

Khomeini, then the country's supreme religious leader, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, in 1989 condemning the Indian-born author to death for alleged blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses.