A senior American official expressed dismay after a Chinese court Tuesday jailed US-based scholar Gao Zhan for 10 years on spying charges, days before Secretary of State Colin Powell was due in Beijing.
"We are quite dismayed that we had asked to go to attend the trial, but shortly before it began, we were told we were not going to be allowed to do that," said the senior State Department official, on condition of anonymity.
"We are concerned about the lack of transparency in the process and the speed with which this was done, and of course by the sentence because our hope had been that she could have been reunited with her family," he told reporters accompanying Powell on a visit to Vietnam -- HANOI (AFP)
