BEIJING (AP) -- A Chinese court has sentenced a U.S.-educated Tibetan music scholar to 18 years in prison for spying on China for the exiled Dalai Lama and others.

Chinese police arrested Ngawang Choephel in August 1995, one month after he returned to Tibet from the United States to videotape folk songs and dances, government-run Radio Tibet said Friday in a report monitored by the BBC.

"He later confessed to having been sent by `the Dalai clique' on behalf of an unnamed foreign country to Tibet and to conducting espionage activities under the pretext of collecting Tibetan folk songs and dances," Radio Tibet said.

The report did not say when the Intermediate People's Court in Shigatse, Tibet's second-largest city, issued the sentence. It did not provide details on Ngawang Choephel's supposed spying, nor did it identify his suspected foreign backers.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, in an October letter to U.S. Senator James Jeffords, R-Vt., said Ngawang Choephel's activities were funded by "some Americans."

The letter, in response to a query on Ngawang Choephel's whereabouts, was the first time China admitted to holding the 30-year-old Tibetan scholar. It came 14 months after he disappeared. Friday was the first time China's state-controlled media reported his case.

The publicizing of Ngawang Choephel's arrest and sentencing comes amid a hard-line Chinese campaign to discredit the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet's fervently Buddhist people, and to quash independence sentiments among the faithful.

Chinese authorities have shut down monasteries and temples and expelled monks and nuns who refuse to denounce the Dalai Lama and pledge loyalty to a united China that includes Tibet.

China has accused the Dalai Lama of leading a separatist struggle since he fled to India in 1958 during an aborted anti-Chinese uprising.

Ngawang Choephel's family left Tibet for India in 1968 -- a period when radical Communists set about destroying the Himalayan region's Buddhist temples and monasteries as vestiges of an oppressive, backward order.

Ngawang Choephel studied and taught ethnomusicology at Middlebury College in Vermont from 1993 to 1994 on a U.S. government-sponsored Fulbright scholarship. He was affiliated with the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama's government is based.

A previous statement issued by the Dalai Lama's government said Ngawang Choephel had gone to Tibet on his own to film a documentary on the fast-disappearing folk music.

The 18-year term is among the harshest handed down for political crimes in the restive Himalayan region, Tibet Information Network, a London-based monitoring group said Friday.