Tehran – Journalist Jailed in Iran Under Suspicion As Spy Has Visited Israel Before

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    Roxana SaberTehran – One of the lawyers of freed Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi has explained why his client was detained and convicted for espionage.

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    Saleh Nikbakht said Saberi had been convicted because she had copied and kept a “confidential Iranian government document” about the US war on Iraq and because she had visited Israel.

    He added that in her appeal court hearing on Sunday, Saberi confirmed that she obtained the document and copied it out of “curiosity” while she was working as a freelance translator for the influential Expediency Council.

    He also confirmed that a visit by her client to Israel in 2006 had been raised at her trial.

    Saberi, who acknowledged visiting Israel, said in her defense that she had carried out no activities against Iran there.

    The Iranian government bars its citizens from visiting Israel.

    Saberi, 32, is a freelance journalist who was initially detained in late January after she continued her work in Iran after her press credentials had expired.

    She was later sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of spying for the government of the United States.

    After a Tehran court of appeals reviewed her case, her jail sentence was reduced to a two-year suspended term and she was released from Iran’s Evin house of detention.

    The suspended sentence will be automatically abolished if Saberi shows no unlawful conduct in the next five years.

    The sentence reduction came after the appeals court ruled that Saberi should not be convicted of ‘working with a hostile country’ because Tehran is not at war with Washington despite US support for hostile groups working against Iran.

    Speaking outside her home in Tehran a day after her release, Saberi expressed delight with the ruling

    “I am very happy that I have been released and reunited with my father and mother. I am very grateful to all the people who knew me or didn’t know me and helped attain my release,” she said.

    Her father, Reza Saberi, who is Iranian, said his daughter “was not tortured at all” while in jail.

    He told reporters that his family plans to return to the US. “Roxana has lost a lot of weight. She is recovering,” he explained.

    Saberi has lived in Iran for six years and has reported as a freelancer for the BBC and National Public Radio and other media outlets.


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