Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian has received an unspecified jail term following his conviction last month on espionage charges, Iranian state TV reported on Sunday.
Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, spokesman for Iran’s judicial branch, announced the punishment in an online statement.
“In brief, it is a prison sentence,” he said, adding that the verdict is “not finalized.”
Leila Ahsan, lawyer for Rezaian, told the Associated Press she had not been informed of the verdict or the details of the sentence. “I have no information about details of the verdict,” she said. “We were expecting the verdict some three months ago.”
Rezaian, who has covered Iran for the Washington Post since 2012, is a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen who grew up in Marin County, California, and spent much of his life in the U.S.
On July 22, 2014, he was detained by Iranian authorities along with his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, and two photojournalists — those three were later released.
Both Rezaian and the Post have vehemently denied the charges, and the newspaper’s editor, Marty Baron, has called last month’s guilty verdict by the Iranian court “an outrageous injustice” and “contemptible.”