China court sentences US ‘spy’ to 3.5-yrs jail

Beijing, April 26: A Chinese court has sentenced an American woman to three and a half years in prison and deportation on espionage charges, a rights group said on Wednesday, and her lawyer said he expected her release soon.

Sandy Phan-Gillis was detained in March 2015 at the Macau border after visiting mainland China with a trade delegation from the Texas oil capital Houston.

She was accused of espionage and stealing state secrets for allegedly passing intelligence to a third party, according to previous reports from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention which cited government sources.

Nanning intermediate people’s court in the southern province of Guangxi passed the sentence on Tuesday, but the American’s next steps will not become clear until a written judgement is released, John Kamm, director of the US-based Dui Hua Foundation rights group, said.

Phan-Gillis was currently being held in a detention centre and not a prison and did not plan to appeal, he said.

Mr Kamm said that “adjusted for time spent in residential surveillance in a designated location, she has already served more than half her sentence, and is accordingly eligible for parole as well as medical parole, commutation and immediate deportation”.