TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Iran announced on Monday it had sentenced a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen to death for spying for the CIA, creating fresh grounds for hostility with Washington at a time when Tehran has responded to new U.S. sanctions with military threats.
The United States denies that Arizona-born Amir Mirza Hekmati is a spy, and has demanded his immediate release. Washington says Hekmati has been denied access to Swiss diplomats, who represent U.S. interests in a country where it has had no mission since its embassy was stormed in 1979.
Iran has accused Hekmati of training with the U.S. military as a spy. It aired a televised confession, denounced by Washington, in which he said he worked for a New York-based video game company designing games to manipulate public opinion in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. intelligence.
"Amir Mirza Hekmati was sentenced to death ... for cooperating with the hostile country America and spying for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)," ISNA news agency quoted judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei as saying.
"The court found him Corrupt on the Earth and Mohareb (one who wages war on God). Hekmati can appeal to the Supreme Court."
The sentence comes at a time when tension between Iran and the West over Tehran's nuclear program has reached a new high, rattling global oil markets. The West fears the work is a secret atomic weapons program, while Iran says it is purely peaceful.
SANCTIONS
After years of sanctions that had little real impact on the Iranian economy, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a new measure into law on New Year's Eve that, if fully implemented, would prevent most countries from buying Iranian oil.
The European Union, which still buys about a fifth of Iran's oil, is poised to announce an embargo at the end of this month, and other countries will have to cut purchases of Iranian crude to receive waivers from the U.S. sanctions. Buyers are demanding steep discounts to do business with Tehran, cutting the revenue it needs to feed its 74 million people.
Iran has remained defiant. In a televised speech on Monday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: "Sanctions imposed on Iran by our enemies will not have any impact on our nation."
"The Iranian nation believes in its rulers."
The rial currency has plunged and Iranians have scrambled to withdraw savings from banks to buy dollars. The hardship comes just two months before a parliamentary election, Iran's first since a 2009 presidential vote that triggered eight months of angry street demonstrations.
Iran's rulers put those protests down by force but, in the two years since, the Arab Spring has shown the vulnerability of authoritarian governments in the region to uprisings fuelled by public anger over economic hardship.
Iran has responded to the new sanctions by threatening to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil shipping route, which leads out of the Gulf and is guarded by a massive, U.S.-led international fleet.
Brent Crude was trading at around $113 a barrel on Monday, up by about $6 in the nine days since Obama signed the new sanctions into law. Iran's military threats and sanctions news have caused spikes in the price throughout recent weeks.
"SPY NETWORK"
In an apparently separate case, Iran also said on Monday it had broken up a U.S.-linked spy network that planned to "fuel unrest" ahead of the March parliamentary election.
"The detained spies were in contact with foreign countries through cyberspace," Intelligence Minister Haydar Moslehi was quoted by state television as saying. He gave no information about the nationalities and the number of those detained.
Hekmati's family says the 28-year-old, who was born in Arizona and graduated from a Michigan high school, was visiting grandparents in Iran when he was held in December. His family was unable to hire a lawyer, and he was defended by a state-appointed advocate whom he met for the first time at the trial.
His family says he previously worked as a U.S. military translator. Iran's Farsi language is one of the two main tongues spoken in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military often deploys Americans of Iranian origin there as translators.
His execution could still be blocked by Iran's highest court, which must confirm all death sentences.
Iran could "hold on to Hekmati and use him - as they have with previous foreign detainees - as a pawn in their rivalry with the United States, rather than execute him immediately and thereby raise tensions with the U.S. even more", said Gala Riani, an analyst at forecasting firm IHS Global Insight.
Tehran, which imposes the death penalty frequently for crimes such as drug dealing and murder, is not known to have executed any U.S. citizen as a spy.
Three U.S. backpackers jailed in Iran as spies in 2009 were freed in 2010 and 2011 in what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called a humanitarian gesture. Iranian-American Roxana Saberi, sentenced to eight years for spying in 2009, was freed after 100 days.
In May Iran said it had arrested 30 people on suspicion of spying for the United States. It later announced that 15 people had been indicted for spying for Washington and Israel.
(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb, Mitra Amiri and Ramin Mostafavi in Tehran and Christopher Wilson in Washington; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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