British-Iranian aid worker's five-year jail term upheld in Iran

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iranian appeals court has confirmed a five-year jail sentence for British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on security charges, Iran's judiciary spokesman said on Sunday. Zaghari-Ratcliffe's family said in September that a Revolutionary Court had handed down the sentence on undisclosed charges. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said the term had been upheld. "The five-year prison verdict against the security defendant Nazanin Zaghari has been finalised," the judiciary's website Mizan quoted Ejei as telling a weekly news conference. Ejei also said Farhad Abd-Saleh was handed a five-year sentence on appeal on security charges, without elaborating. Iranian authorities have given few details about Abd-Saleh, who was named in October along with five others, some of them Iranian dual nationals, who had been sentenced to 10 years in jail for "espionage and collaborating with the American government". Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained in early April as she tried to leave Iran after a visit with her two-year-old daughter. She works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News. Iran's Revolutionary Guards had accused her of trying to overthrow the clerical establishment, but the official charges against her were not made public. Several Iranian dual nationals from the United States, Britain, Canada and France have been detained in the past year and are being kept behind bars on charges including espionage and collaborating with hostile governments. (Reporting by Dubai newsroom; editing by David Stamp)