Iran has decided to spare the life of a convicted drug trafficker who survived hanging, media reports on Wednesday quoted Justice Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as saying.

The convict, identified only as Alireza M, 37, was pronounced dead earlier this month by the attending doctor after hanging for 12 minutes from a noose suspended from a crane at a jail in northeast Iran. But the next day, staff at the mortuary in the city of Bojnourd where his shrouded body was taken discovered he was still breathing.

Media later reported that he had fallen into a coma. Pour-Mohammadi implied that a second execution would be damaging for Iran's image. "If he survives, it is not expedient to hang him again," said the minister.

An Iranian prisoner who survived his execution and revived in the morgue having been pronounced dead, will not be hanged for a second time, Iran's justice minister has said. The minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, said in Tehran on Tuesday night that the 37-year-old, who is now on life support, will not face a second execution, Iran's state news agency reported.

The man, identified in the Iranian media only by his first name, Alireza, was hanged this month in Bojnurd prison in Iran's northern Khorasan province. Alireza, a father of two, had been convicted of smuggling drugs. On the execution day medics pronounced him dead after he had been hanging by the neck for 12 minutes. Morgue workers realised he had survived only when they spotted steam (condensation) in the plastic cover he was wrapped in.

Alireza was taken to Bojnurd's Imam Ali hospital and contradictory reports have been given as to his condition. A nurse told Jam-e-Jam, a state newspaper, that his general health was satisfactory and improving every day. Other Iranian newspapers, however, reported he had slipped into a coma and was clinically brain dead. The reformist Iranian newspaper, Shargh, quoted a former judiciary official as saying that Alireza should not be hanged under Iranian law.

"The person who survives an execution will not be hanged again according to our laws, and in the past people were not hanged twice in similar cases," Morteza Moghtadaie told Shargh. Last week, an Iranian grand Ayatollah stepped into the case, intervening to assert his opinion that Alireza should not be "re-executed", further raising hopes that his life would be spared. Human rights organisations have called on Iran to halt any plan to execute Alireza, saying to hang him twice was "simply ghastly" and betrayed "a basic lack of humanity that sadly underpins much of Iran's justice system".