Iran Sentences American Journalist To 8 Years In Prison

TEHRAN, April 18 - A revolutionary court has sentenced an Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, to eight years in prison after convicting her of spying for the United States, her lawyer said Saturday.

The United States has called the charges against Ms. Saberi baseless and demanded her release.

She was initially reported to have been detained for buying alcohol, an illegal act in the Islamic republic.

The ISNA news agency, quoting an unidentified judiciary source, confirmed that a revolutionary court had sentenced Ms. Saberi for espionage - a charge that could have risked the death sentence, according to Agence France-Presse. No date was given for the verdict.

"Roxana said in court that her earlier confessions were not true and she told me she had been tricked into believing that she would be released if she cooperated," her father, Reza Saberi, told A.F.P.

"Her denial is documented in her case but apparently they did not pay attention to it," he added, without saying when he had spoken to his daughter.

"We are very shocked and we were not expecting it," A.F.P. quoted him as saying. "We were hoping for six months and then clemency."

The sentence comes after Washington has made overtures to Iran about starting a dialogue over its nuclear program. President Obama has expressed a willingness to talk with Tehran after years of strained relations under the Bush administration.

On Thursday the State Department said that Ms. Saberi's jailing was not helpful and that Iran would gain good will from the United States if it "responded in a positive way" to the case, The A.P. had reported. "This charge is baseless and it's without foundation," Robert Wood, a State Department spokesman, said last week.

But Alireza Jamshidi, told ISNA, a news agency, on Tuesday that Washington's intervention in the case was "ridiculous and against international laws."

"It is ridiculous for a person or a government to make comments about a case without examining the evidence first and to make this kind of judgment to say if a person is guilty or not," he said.

Ms. Saberi, 31, was arrested in late January on the much lighter charge of buying alcohol, an illegal act in the Islamic republic. The foreign ministry said later that she was accused of working as a reporter without press credentials, but the prosecutor's office said this month that she was put on trial for spying. She is being held in the country's notorious Evin prison in Tehran.

Ms. Saberui, who grew up in Fargo, N.D., has lived in Iran for six years and has worked for National Public Radio (NPR) and the BBC. The authorities revoked her press card in 2006, according to an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi.

The verdict came after an unusually swift trial, which started last Monday. Ms. Saberi was tried behind closed doors.

In a statement released Saturday, Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of NPR, said "We are deeply distressed by this harsh and unwarranted sentence."

She also said that "we know her as an established and respected professional journalist."

Ms. Saberi's parents traveled to Iran from the United States to support her. They appealed for her release in a letter last month to Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.