Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who was released this week after more than three months in Iranian custody, has left Iran on a flight to Austria, according to a report on the Web site of National Public Radio on Thursday night. N.P.R. adds that Ms. Saberi and her parents plan to fly to the United States soon.

The French news agency Agence France Presse reported: “Minutes before the plane carrying Roxana took off, Payam Mohebi, a family friend of Roxana told AFP that she and her parents were traveling with him on board a flight from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport.”

Earlier on Thursday, The Associated Press reported that a film Ms. Saberi had co-written with her partner, the film’s director, Bahman Ghobadi, premiered at the Cannes film festival. The A.P. reported that the film, “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” is about “the risk of censorship and prison faced by Iranian musicians and other artists.”

Manohla Dargis reviewed the film favorably for The Times. Mr. Ghobadi told AFP that Iran’s “tight censorship and restrictions mean he ‘may not go back.’” Variety, in its own unique style, predicts: “Pic will attract extra interest because of the helmer’s publicly stated desire to emigrate and his connection with recently imprisoned Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi (here credited as exec producer and co-writer).”

Mr. Ghobadi, who published an open letter last month declaring that he was engaged to Ms. Saberi, told Time magazine earlier this week that “he believed it was in great part because of his endeavors that Saberi was being released so quickly.” On Monday, Time reported that outside Evin prison in Tehran, while waiting for Ms. Saberi to be released, “There was clear friction between Ghobadi and Saberi’s parents, who kept themselves several feet apart from the director. … One source close to the family said they perceive him as taking advantage of her recent newsworthiness to publicize his film.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Iranian government-supported broadcaster Press TV reported the “Iranian Intelligence Ministry says that despite being released, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was proven to be involved in acts of espionage.” Press TV added that:

One of her lawyers, Saleh Nikbakht, explained to BBC Persian on Wednesday that his client’s conviction was a result of accidental espionage.

Nikbakht said Saberi had been convicted because she had copied and kept a “confidential Iranian government document” about the US invasion of Iraq and because she had visited Israel, travel which is banned by the Iranian government.

Saberi had confirmed in her May 10 appeal that she obtained the document and copied it out of “curiosity” while she was working as a freelance translator for the influential Expediency Council, according to Nikbakht.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

But the spying possibility remains unanswered as well IMO. As I mentioned, we may never know – since Saberi will obviously deny any spying and Iran won’t divulge what, if any, real evidence it had.

Below you see the wear on her face from the incarceration, which began
Jan ‘09 -

Length :40 (slight delay at start)

At a press briefing on May 11, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on the news that imprisoned journalist Roxana Saberi has been released from prison in Iran and would be returning to the United States. While Clinton was very pleased that Saberi had been released and reunited with her family, she emphasized that the U.S. continues to “take issue with the charges against her and the verdicts rendered.”

(NPR and it’s television sister PBS, are funded by individual and corporate donations and partially by taxpayers. They are known for less slant and more in-depth reporting, than fully commercial networks such as NBC and CNN).

Iran said it had espionage evidence, but the conviction happened in
a 1-day, closed trial in which the world could not learn of any specific information against her. That alone made the conviction widely doubted
in the U.S.

I wonder if Iran may have cracked down on her for trying to push the cultural envelope towards more secularization and/or equality, as Marwa Rakha endeavors in Egypt (see her link under B/P Favored).