Scholar defends U.S. grad student sentenced to jail

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A ChineseAmerican graduate student at Princeton University sentenced to 10 years in prison in Iran for allegedly “infiltrating” the country and sending confidential material abroad is innocent of all charges against him, his professor said Monday.

Xiyue Wang’s arrest, which happened nearly a year ago, only came to light Sunday when Iran’s judiciary announced his sentence and the detention of President Hassan Rouhani’s brother in an unrelated case.

Princeton said that it is “very distressed” by the charges leveled against Wang while he was carrying out scholarly research in the Islamic Republic. The university has been working with Wang’s family, the U.S. government, lawyers and others to secure his release, it said.

“Xiyue Wang is a remarkable, linguistically gifted graduate student,” said Princeton Professor Stephen Kotkin, who has served as Wang’s doctoral adviser. “He is innocent of all the charges.”

An article posted on Mizan Online, a website affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, said Wang, 37, was born in Beijing and is a dual national of the United States and China.

He has already filed an appeal to his sentence, according to the website.

Wang was arrested on Aug. 8, 2016, and is accused of passing confidential information about Iran to the U.S. State Department, Princeton’s Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the British Institute of Persian Studies, Mizan Online said.

It alleged he scanned some 4,500 pages of digital documents, paid thousands of dollars to access archives he needed and sought access to confidential areas of Tehran libraries.

He was arrested while conducting research on the Qajar dynasty for his doctorate in late 19th and early 20th century Eurasian history, according to Princeton. He was expecting to continue his research in Russia and needed to get as much work done in Iran as he could before taking up a fellowship there, Kotkin said.

That included scanning large volumes of documents that he could access later — something Kotkin described as “normal, standard scholarly practice.” The documents he accessed were roughly 100 years old, the professor said.

“We saw nothing out of the ordinary on anything that he undertook or did,” Kotkin said. “He’s a graduate student in good standing.”