Iran Jails Princeton Ph.D. Student as Spy

A Chinese-American graduate student enrolled at Princeton University has reportedly been sentenced by an Iranian court to 10 years in prison for espionage, The Washington Post reported, citing the Iranian judiciary’s official news agency, Mizan.

Xiyue Wang, age 37, is a fourth-year doctoral student in history at Princeton who, according to a statement from the university, "was arrested in Iran last summer, while there doing scholarly research on the administrative and cultural history of the late Qajar dynasty in connection with his Ph.D. dissertation.”

“We were very distressed by the charges brought against him in connection with his scholarly activities, and by his subsequent conviction and sentence. His family and the university are distressed at his continued imprisonment and are hopeful that he will be released after his case is heard by the appellate authorities in Tehran,” Daniel Day, Princeton's vice president of communications, said in the statement quoted by the Post.

The official news report from Mizan said that Wang was sentenced as part of an “infiltration project” that involved gathering “confidential articles” to send to the U.S. Department of State and Western universities. As the Post describes it, the Mizan report includes a photo from the Princeton website and uses, as evidence of espionage, a published quote from Wang in an annual report for the British Institute of Persian Studies in which he described help he had received from the institute in accessing Iranian archives and libraries.