The man in charge of overseeing elections in Iran has quit his job in protest, several months after parliamentary polls which saw most reformist candidates disqualified and religious hard-liners win, the official news agency IRNA reported Sunday.
Morteza Mobalagh, himself a reformist, said he told the Islamic republic's interior minister that he would "never accept the responsibility of organising any more elections".
He did, however, say he would stay in his other post as a deputy interior minister until the end of the second and final term of embattled reformist President Mohammad Khatami in mid-2005.
Prior to February's parliament elections, the Guardians Council - a vetting body controlled by hard-liners - blacklisted thousands of candidates, most of them reformers, and paved the way for a crushing win by regime-approved religious conservatives.
The crisis saw a number of reformist officials threaten to resign, although the threats of a mass walkout never materialised.
The next elections scheduled here are the presidential polls set for June 2005.