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WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama on Sunday denied an Iranian-American journalist was a spy and demanded her release, after she was sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage.
'She is an American citizen and I have complete confidence that she was not engaging in any sort of espionage,' Obama told reporters at the end of the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.
Reporter Roxana Saberi was convicted by an Iranian revolutionary court of spying for the United States during a closed-door trial, in a verdict unveiled Saturday.
'She was an Iranian-American who was interested in the country which her family came from, and it is appropriate for her to be treated as such and to be released,' said Obama.
The verdict came despite repeated US calls for Saberi's release, and Obama's diplomatic overtures to Tehran after three decades of severed ties.
Meanwhile Sunday the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) in Washington condemned Iran's "dubious" trial imposed on Saberi.
'The changing rationales for her arrest and the one-day secret trial seriously call into question the validity of the charges against Ms. Saberi and the fairness of her trial,' said NIAC president Trita Parsi.
'Iranian-Americans specifically seem to have become targets of the Iranian government in recent years,' Parsi added.
Obama's spokesman Saturday said the US leader was "deeply disappointed" at the sentence.
After speaking with the president about the case, US national security council spokesman Denis McDonough said that Obama "underscored our belief that she is wrongly charged, she is an American journalist who's just been practising journalism".
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, also in Trinidad and Tobago for the Americas gathering, said the United States would "continue to vigorously raise our concerns to the Iranian government".
Saberi's father Reza told National Public Radio that he was concerned for his daughter's physical well-being in prison.
'She is very weak and frail, last time we saw,' he said.
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