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A small Florida church has shrugged off global outrage and vowed to go ahead with a Koran burning ceremony amid growing fears it will ignite a wave of Islamic rage.

Condemnation rained down from top US officials, the military, the Vatican and other religious and world leaders, but the church refused to halt plans to torch the Islamic holy book on Saturday's anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"As of this time we have no intention of canceling," Pastor Terry Jones told a press conference here Wednesday, adding his evangelical church, the Dove World Outreach Center, had received numerous messages of support.

Jones had indicated he was praying for guidance on whether to go ahead with the incendiary event after warnings from US Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus that US and allied troops could be targeted in revenge.

"We understand the general's concerns and we are still considering it," Jones said, but swiftly added he had been contacted by a special forces soldier who told him "the people in the field are 100 percent behind us."

After his press conference Wednesday, Jones reportedly met inside his church with a Florida imam, in a sign that the renegade pastor might be willing to tone down or even cancel his event.

According to the Gainesville Sun, the imam of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, Muhammad Musri, met with Jones for 40 minutes in the pastor's office.

"I told him the world would admire your courage if you come out and say, 'Because of my devotion to Christ and the Bible, I'm going to do the right thing.'" the Sun quoted Musri as saying.

"I strongly believe at the end of the day that he is going to make the right step and call off this event."

The gun-toting pastor, who has received death threats, says the aim of Saturday's three-hour evening event is to send a message to radical Islamists.

"Our burning of the Koran is to call attention that something's wrong. And it is possibly time for us in a new way to actually stand up and confront terrorism," he said.

The planned torching of some 200 Korans -- many of which have been donated to the church -- comes amid an angry debate over plans to build an Islamic cultural center in New York close to where the World Trade Center once stood.

Many fear if the Koran burning goes ahead it will further raise anti-Islamic sentiment.

Late Wednesday the imam of the mosque to be built near Ground Zero, Feisal Abdul Rauf, told CNN that burning the Koran is "not the right thing to do" because "it's going to feed into the radicals in the Muslim world. It's dangerous."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denounced the Florida church's plans as "disgraceful," and the State Department sought Wednesday to downplay an event likely to be shown on television screens around the world.

"We hope that the world will appreciate that this is the action of a very small fringe group and does not represent the views of the United States or Americans as a whole," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was deeply disturbed by the plans, with his spokesman releasing a statement saying: "Such actions cannot be condoned by any religion."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel decried the plans as "abhorrent" at an event honoring a Danish cartoonist whose 2005 drawing of the Prophet Mohammed sparked protests around the world.

And former Republican vice presidential candidate and leading conservative Sarah Palin slammed the move as an insensitive provocation "much like building a mosque at Ground Zero," urging Jones to think again.

"It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don't feed that fire," she wrote on her Facebook page.

Officials in the small university town of Gainesville -- reluctantly dragged into the global spotlight -- met Wednesday to draw up contingency plans.

City spokesman Bob Woods told AFP that church officials would be violating a ban on open-air burning and would be subject to a 250 dollar fine if they set fire to the books.

But there is little they can do to stop the event from going ahead, protected as it is by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech.

Fire authorities turned down an application a few weeks ago from Jones to hold the ceremony, and police cannot intervene until they actually light the Korans.

AFP