NEW DELHI, Dec 31 (Reuter) - Tibet's government-in-exile, led by the Dalai Lama, on Tuesday condemned an 18-year jail sentence given to a Tibetan music scholar by China on alleged spying charges and demanded his immediate release.

"This is simply outrageous," Tempa Tsering, a spokesman for the Nobel prize winning spiritual leader, said in a statement issued in New Delhi.

Beijing arrested Ngawang Choephel, 30, a Tibetan music expert touring the Himalayan region, on espionage charges in 1995.

Last week, Chinese radio said he had been sentenced to 18 years in prison and claimed he had confessed to having been sent by "the Dalai (Lama) clique."

"Till now the Chinese authorities haven't managed to come up with even a shred of evidence that Ngawang Choephel is actually engaged in espionage activities," Tsering said.

"Leave alone having sent him to Tibet to do espionage, as accused by the Chinese authorities, (the government-in-exile) did not even know he was in Tibet until the news of his arrest," Tsering said.

The Dalai Lama, regarded by his Buddhist followers as Tibet's god-king, has been living in India since 1959 and is leading a movement against Chinese rule in Tibet, which China annexed in 1950.

The Tibetan government-in-exile is headquartered in Dharamsala, in India's Himalayan foothills.

Choephel left Tibet as a child and grew up in India before becoming a music scholar in the United States, according to an official of the London-based Tibetan Information Network.

Choephel, who was in Tibet to produce an amateur documentary about traditional music and dance, had renounced his Indian refugee status and entered Tibet as a Chinese citizen, the official said last week.

Chinese radio had also said Choephel was working for a "foreign country," a thinly veiled reference to the United States, whose diplomats in Beijing had offered no immediate comment.