BEIJING, Jan 3 (AFP) - China's official media confirmed Friday the 18-year jail term handed down for spying to a Tibetan scholar who returned to his homeland from the United States to study traditional Tibetan music and dance.

A front page article in the December 26 edition of the Tibet Daily said Ngawang Choephel, 30, had confessed and was "recently" sentenced for collecting information for the region's spiritual leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, with the support of a "foreign country."

"In July 1995, he was sent to Shigatse with money and spy equipment by the Dalai clique, and in the name of collecting Tibetan folk dances and songs, he went to Lhasa, Shannan, Linzhi and other places to collect information," the newspaper said.

"He admitted his spying activities and the Shigatse Intermediate People's Court sentenced him to 18 years imprisonment and the deprivation of political rights for four years after that," it added.

Choephel, who was a Fulbright scholar and had returned to Tibet to make a film with private US funding about traditional Tibetan music and dance, was arrested in September 1995.

His conviction in late December 1996 came after Beijing launched a sharp crackdown on simmering nationalist sentiment in Tibet.

In May, Beijing launched a crackdown on religion by banning all photographs of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, from monasteries and implementing a re-education campaign.

Chinese troops took over Tibet in 1951 and then put down an abortive uprising in 1959, prompting the Dalai Lama to flee to India.