Iran has cleared a former British embassy staffer who was jailed last year on espionage charges, and commuted his sentence to a suspended one-year jail term, his lawyer said on Monday. "The appeals court dropped espionage charges for which Hossein Rassam was sentenced to four years in prison," the lawyer, Babak Farahi, told AFP.
"He was sentenced to one year in jail, suspended for five years, for propaganda against the establishment... as he had no previous record and held no managerial posts," he said.
But the court "upheld a previous ruling that bans him from working for foreign embassies for five years," the lawyer said, adding the appeals verdict was issued on Sunday.
Rassam, the embassy's chief political analyst, was arrested in June 2009 along with eight other local employees of the mission on charges of taking part in riots after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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