The man was convicted for being an 'infiltrating American agent', Mizan Online, a news agency affiliated with the judiciary quoted Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, spokesman for the Iranian judiciary as saying.

The accused has been identified as 37-year old Xiyue Wang, a Princeton University history graduate.

"He had entered the country through a special connection but the ministry of intelligence identified him and arrested him," the spokesman said, adding, "It became clear that he was involved in the infiltration project and the initial court has sentenced him to 10 years but this could be appealed.”

However, Wang, who is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University, found support from the institution.

In an e-mailed statement to The Guardian, the university said: "Xiyue Wang is a fourth-year doctoral candidate … in the Department of History at Princeton University. His field is late 19th- and early 20th-century Eurasian history. He was in Iran last summer solely for the purpose of doing scholarly research on the administrative and cultural history of the late Qajar dynasty in connection with his PhD dissertation."

"We were very distressed to learn that charges were brought against him in connection with his scholarly work, and to learn of the subsequent conviction and sentence. We cannot comment more at the present time, except to say that the university continues to do everything it can to be supportive of Mr Wang and his family," the statement read.

Earlier in 2016, the Middle-Eastern nation released an Iranian-American reporter after imprisoning him for 18 months on grounds of spying.

Defending the sentence, Mizan said that Wang entered the country as a master's student but resorted to collecting top secret information.

"He entered the country under the cover of a master’s student but has been gathering secret and top secret information for organizations such as the US state department, the Harvard Kennedy School and the British Institute of Persian Studies," the agency stated.

He was accused of building a 4,500-page digital archive.

Khamenei Image: Official website of Ali Khamenei/Wikipedia

Prison image: Wallpaper