Iran frees Roxana Saberi after retrial

Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who had been sentenced to spend eight years in jail in Iran on spying charges, has been freed. "I'm OK. I don't want to make any comments but I am OK," she told the AFP news agency.

Saberi, 32, a freelance reporter who has worked for National Public Radio and the BBC, was initially arrested for buying a bottle of wine in January, but this soon escalated to a charge of working as a journalist without valid credentials - she had her press pass revoked in 2006 - and then to one of espionage. Her trial, which was held behind closed doors in April, lasted only an hour, after which she was sent back to Evin prison in Tehran.

After going on a hunger stike in protest at her imprisonment, Saberi looked gaunt and unhealthy on Sunday when she appeared at a much longer, five-hour retrial. In contrast to the first trial, she was allowed to meet with her lawyer for thirty minutes before this one.

Now, her sentence has been reduced to a two-year suspended term, she has been banned from working as a journalist in Iran for five years, and is free to leave the country.

Saberi grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and won the title of Miss North Dakota 1997, before reaching the last ten in the Miss America pageant. Her boyfriend, Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian 'new wave' film director whose films have won awards at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, protested publicly against her imprisonment.

He sent a letter to the authorities, "On the other side of the ocean, the Americans have protested against her imprisonment, because she is an American citizen. But I say no, she is Iranian, and she loves Iran," he wrote.

"I beg you, let her go! I beg you not to throw her in the midst of your political games! She is too weak and too pure to take part in your games." ·