Apple Script : How can I copy html content to the clipboard?

I know how to copy plain text to the clipboard:

oascript -e 'set the clipboard to "plain text"'

But the question is how can I copy html contents to the clipboard? For example, how can I copy the following html content to the clipboard:

<b>bold text</b>

so that I get bold text when I paste it in TextEdit?

Thanks for the help in advance!

I found an intermediate solution for this:

echo "<b>bold text</b>" | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf | pbcopy

This works, so far so good, but unfortunately I found that it doesn't work for an image tag:

echo "<img src=\"https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo3w.png\">" | textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf | pbcopy

This does not do the job I want, so anybody knows the reason?
Thanks!

I've found a working solution and posted it below :)