An Iranian judge has sentenced a 28-year-old US-Iranian man to death for spying for the CIA.
Amir Mirzai Hekmati, a former Marine born in the US, was "sentenced to death for cooperating with a hostile nation, membership of the CIA and trying to implicate Iran in terrorism," the Fars news agency said, quoting a verdict by the Revolutionary Court judge in Tehran.
He was shown on state television in mid-December saying in fluent Farsi and English that he was a CIA operative sent to infiltrate Iran's intelligence ministry.
Hekmati, who was born to an Iranian immigrant family living in the US, had been arrested months earlier.
Iranian officials said his cover was blown by agents for Iran who spotted him at the US-run Bagram military air base in neighbouring Afghanistan.
But Hekmati's family in the US told media there he had travelled to Iran to visit his Iranian grandmothers and insisted he was not a spy.
In his sole trial hearing, on 27 December, prosecutors relied on Hekmati's "confession" to say he tried to penetrate the intelligence ministry by posing as a disaffected former US soldier with classified information to give.
The US has demanded Hekmati's release.
The US State Department said Iran did not permit diplomats from the Swiss embassy, which handles Washington's interests in the absence of US-Iran ties, to see Hekmati before or during his trial.
Hekmati's death sentence adds to a series of grave points of contention between Iran and the US stemming from an escalating showdown over Tehran's nuclear programme.
