(14 May 2009)
Roxana Saberi, the US-Iranian journalist freed from an Iranian jail, was still in Tehran on Thursday after she retrieved her Iranian and American passports from Iranian authorities, according to one of her lawyers.
Saberi was originally convicted of spying in a brief, closed-door trial and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The 32-year-old dual Iranian-American citizen, who spent four months in prison, was freed on Monday and reunited with her parents after an appeals court reduced her sentence to a two-year suspended sentence.
AP Television footage showed Saberi returning to her Tehran apartment on Thursday afternoon after she didn't return home on Wednesday evening.
Saleh Nikbakht, one of Saberi's lawyers, said she had managed to retrieve her Iranian and American passports on Wednesday evening.
Saberi hasn't revealed her plans for leaving Iran yet and has declined to be filmed or interviewed.
Iran's intelligence chief earlier insisted that Saberi was guilty of spying for the US because the appeals court that reduced her prison sentence and freed her did not acquit her of the original charges.
The US had called the spying charges baseless and demanded the journalist's release.
Nikbakht revealed on Tuesday that Saberi was convicted of spying for the US in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the US war in Iraq.
According to Nikbakht, Saberi had copied the report "out of curiosity" while she worked as a freelance translator for a powerful body connected to Iran's ruling clerics.
Saberi, who was crowned 1997 Miss North Dakota, moved to Iran six years ago and worked as a freelance journalist for several organisations, including NPR and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
She was arrested in late January.
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