(CNN) — Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian has been convicted by a Revolutionary Court in Iran, according to state-run media.
Rezaian was reportedly facing up to 20 years, but the sentence was not specified on Monday.
He has already been behind bars for more than a year. Rezaian was taken into custody in July 2014 and later charged with espionage.
The Post has denied all the claims against him.
On Monday, the newspaper’s executive editor Marty Baron said the “guilty verdict” announcement “represents an outrageous injustice.”
“We are working with Jason’s family and Iranian counsel to pursue an immediate appeal, and we expect Jason’s lawyer, Leila Ahsan, also to petition for Jason to be released on bail pending a final resolution of the case,” Baron said.
Iran’s detention of Rezaian has been widely condemned. Analysts say he has been treated like a pawn amid geopolitical disputes between Iran, the United States and other world powers.
His trial, which the Post denounced as a sham, started in May and ended in August. Weeks came and went without any word about a verdict.
Then on Sunday an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, said a ruling had been handed down but that he didn’t know what it contained.
Mohseni Ejei said the ruling may be appealed by Rezaian or his lawyer in the next 20 days.
Doug Jehl, the Post’s foreign editor, said the puzzling, secretive situation “suggests once again that Jason is not really a prisoner, he’s a bargaining chip being used by the Iranian government to extract some concessions from the U.S.”
Th U.S. State Department reiterated its call “for all charges against Jason to be dropped and for him to be immediately released.”
Rezaian’s family members had been bracing for a guilty verdict and considered it likely, given what they called an “unconscionable pattern by Iranian authorities of silence, obfuscation, delay and a total lack of adherence to international law, as well as Iranian law.”
On Sunday, the family said, “Jason was simply a journalist doing his job and following all the rules when he was wrongly arrested and imprisoned in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. He is an innocent man that has been kept under harsh conditions to the detriment of his health and well-being for nearly 450 days … We remain hopeful that Jason will soon be released and reunited with this family.”
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