North Korea's state news agency says the country's top court has convicted two U.S. journalists and sentenced them to 12 years in labor prison.
The Korean Central News Agency says the Central Court tried American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from June 4 to 8.
It said Monday the trial confirmed an unspecified "grave crime" against the nation, and of illegally crossing into North Korea.
The report says the court "sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor." The sentence is much harsher than many observers had hoped for.
The journalists were working for former Vice President Al Gore's San Francisco-based Current TV.
The families of Lee, 36, and Ling, 32 -- sister of National Geographic "Explorer" TV journalist Lisa Ling, who pressed publicly for their release last week -- had no immediate comment, spokeswoman Alanna Zahn said from New York. Gore also had no comment, spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said.
Ling grew up in Carmichael, near Sacramento. Her father still lives there.
North Korea's top court had been silence on the court proceedings since it announced it began hearing the case involving Ling and Lee last Wednesday at 11 p.m. California time.
Many worried the news blackout could mean the journalists will be used as bargaining chips. North Korea's communist leadership could be waiting to see what kind of sanctions Washington and the U.N. will use to punish the nation for its latest nuclear blast and barrage of missile tests last week.
Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korean expert at Dongguk University in Seoul, said Pyongyang could still free the reporters and treat their release as a goodwill gesture that should be reciprocated with a special U.S. envoy visiting the isolated state.
The journalists were doing a story about the trafficking of women when they were arrested on March 17 near the Chinese-North Korean border. It was unclear if they strayed into the North or were grabbed by border guards who encroached on Chinese territory.
Current TV has remained silent on the story. An employee of Current told Gawker the company ordered all employees to remain silent on the matter as soon at the two were detained and they have stuck to that policy ever since.
But on Friday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out the possibility of Gore being sent to take part in the negotiation for their release.
"It's a very, very sensitive issue, I'm not going to go into it," Kelly told reporters.
When asked if Gore himself was the one to raise the issue of him going, Kelly refused to get into any details on discussions that may or may not have taken place.
Ling's sister, well-known journalist Lisa Ling, has spoken to her sister once on the phone. She said in an interview earlier this week, "They're very, very scared." She broke down in tears as she addressed a crowd of supporters Wednesday night in Santa Monica, the night the trial is said to have started.
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Now that the women have been found guilty, they will not be allowed to appeal because the case is being heard in Pyongyang's high court, where decisions are final, said Choi Eun-suk, a professor on North Korean legal affairs at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in South Korea.
The sentence is "a terrible shock for all those who have repeatedly insisted on their innocence," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement, noting that North Korea is ranked as Asia's worst country for press freedom.
It comes a month after Iran released Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, who had been sentenced to eight years in prison for on a charge of spying for the United States. An appeals court reduced that to a two-year suspended sentence and she was freed May 11.
