TIN, London - 27 August: Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan exile educated as a Fulbright scholar in the US, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for spying, according a Radio Tibet broadcast monitored by the BBC. It said he had been partly funded by a foreign country, which elsewhere Beijing has identified as the US.

Ngawang Choephel, aged 30, was a music teacher and collector of folk music who was arrested in September 1995 when he visited Tibet for the first time in order to make an unauthorised video film of traditional Tibetan music and dance.

The sentence is far longer than expected and only two Tibetans have received longer sentences for a political offence other than murder since the end of the Mao era 20 years ago. It exceeds by three years the sentence handed out to the US-based human rights activist Harry Wu, who was allowed to returned to the US after an international outcry last year.

The sentence is only exceeded by two Tibetan monks, Ngawang Phulchung and Jamphel Changchub, who received 19 year sentences in 1989 for printing political documents calling for democracy and freedom in Tibet. Two other Tibetans received life sentences in 1989 for killing a policeman during a demonstration the previous year. The average sentence for a political offence in Tibet since 1987 is till now 6.4 years.

China's decision to try the exile musician and the long sentence handed out are likely to be seen in the west as provocative and may have an impact on Sino-US relations. The broadcast referred three times to a "certain foreign country" which it said had supplied financial support and equipment and to whom it said that Ngawang Choephel was supplying information. The Chinese authorities, in a letter from their ambassador in the US to the US Senator James Jeffords in October this year, has already named the foreign country as the US.

The musician had received a small grant for his documentary project from a US foundation and from individual sponsors, but the broadcast suggested that he was funded by the US government.

The Tibetan exile government has denied that the musician was working for them, and a number of westerners who travelled with him in Tibet or assisted on his project also say he was genuinely involved in filming dancers and appeared anxious to avoid any kind of political activities.

The Chinese authorities announced on Radio Tibet yesterday, 26th December, that Ngawang Choephel had been sentenced in Shigatse because he "had carried out espionage activities".

"In July 1995, Ngawang Choephel, who was sent by the Dalai clique with expenditures and equipment provided by a certain foreign country, entered Tibet to carry out his activities under the pretext of collecting information on folk songs and dances in Tibet," said the Radio broadcast.

"During his stay in Tibet, Ngawang Choephel, following his intelligence collecting programme, went to Lhasa, Shannan, Nyingchi and Xigaze to carry out his espionage activities, in an attempt to provide the information gathered to the Dalai clique's government in exile and to an organization of a certain foreign country," it added.

The broadcast gave no other evidence to support the charges against Ngawang Choephel other than to say that he had "confessed to the above mentioned activities".

Ngawang Choephel was sentenced under China's State Security Law, passed in 1993 as part of a growing tendency by Beijing to use counter-espionage laws for political offenders rather than counter-revolutionary legislation, which has been criticised by the international community.

The musician was a Tibetan refugee was born in western Tibet but in 1968 fled with his parents to India at the age of 2. He spent a year studying and teaching at Middlebury college in Vermont from 1993. As a refugee travelling usually on Indian travel documents he would not have been allowed to enter Tibet other than on special papers issued by the Chinese government for Tibetan exiles, which would have required him to recognise that he was technically a Chinese citizen.