A state security court in Damascus on February 14th sentenced Tal al-Mallouhi, a 19-year-old blogger arrested in 2009, to five years in jail on charges of spying. Her case had attracted much attention from fellow bloggers across the Middle East, and the US State Department criticised the sentence as an abuse of human rights and of basic freedom of expression. The Syrian court did not immediately provide details about the nature of her offence. Her published blogs had focused mainly on the plight of the Palestinians. On February 17th the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a press conference at which Bushra Kanafani, the ministry's director of information, gave a detailed exposé of the case against Ms Mallouhi. She said that at the age of 15 Ms Mallouhi had developed a relationship with an unidentified Austrian soldier serving in the UN peacekeeping forces on the Golan Heights. He supposedly persuaded her father to move the family to Cairo, the Egyptian capital, where he set up an Internet café. Ms Kanafani said that Ms Mallouhi was contacted by a US embassy official who was identified by a code name of Jessica and instructed to try to recruit a Syrian diplomat. This diplomat supposedly refused. Ms Kanafani alleged that Jessica and another (male) US embassy official ambushed him on a Cairo street and beat him so badly that he was partially paralysed. Copies of identity cards of the two embassy officials were distributed at the press conference. Ms Mallouhi and her family returned to Damascus, where she was instructed to visit a number of political prisoners, including Fida Hourani and Kamal Bunni. Ms Kanafani was asked what the Syrian government thought of the attention that had been paid to Ms Mallouhi by fellow Egyptian bloggers of the April 6th movement (which initiated the protests that resulted in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak) since her arrest nearly two years ago. She said that once the bloggers were aware of the full facts they would take a different view of Ms Mallouhi. The US did not give any immediate reaction to Ms Kanafani's claims. The affair will pose a delicate problem for the recently arrived US ambassador, Robert Ford, particularly as the Syrian foreign ministry has made direct allegations against two named US diplomats (identified as the first secretary and second secretary at the US embassy in Cairo).