The refusal appeared to dash any hopes Iran had for improving its relations with European capitals to counter an American campaign to isolate the Islamic revolutionary regime.

Iran’s reassertion of Rushdie’s death sentence, imposed in 1989 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the country’s revolutionary leader, was made by Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmoud Vaezi during talks here with senior diplomats from France, Spain and Germany, according to European diplomats and Iran’s official news agency.

The rejection came after weeks of conciliatory messages that suggested Iran was ready to abandon support for the death threat, French officials said.

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They said Tehran had been signaling that it wanted to counter U.S. efforts to isolate its regime by launching a diplomatic campaign to improve relations with European govern-

Earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati declared, Iran is not going to send anybody, any commandos, to kill anybody in Europe.

Mohammed Larijani, a former deputy foreign minister, told a Swedish newspaper that the death sentence was a clear breach of international law and that offering a bounty for his death was an unforgivable mistake.

The Europeans said such mes-sages encouraged them to believe Iran was ready to soften its support for the fatwa, or religious decree, which offers a $2 million bounty to any Muslim who kills Rushdie as punishment for writing The Satanic Verses.

Khomeini and other Islamic leaders charged that the book blasphemes the prophet Muham-mad.