TEHRAN - The lawyer of a French teaching assistant who was arrested on spying charges after Iran's disputed June election said he was hopeful she would be acquitted after a court held its last trial session on Saturday.

In this session my client and I provided our last defence and we are hopeful that the court would issue, in coming days, a verdict based on exonerating my client, ISNA news agency quoted lawyer Mohammad Ali Mahdavi-Sabet as saying.

Reiss, who has been out of jail on bail and staying at the French embassy, was accused of taking part in a Western plot to destabilise the Iranian government after the June 12 vote in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected.

Her case has raised tensions between France and Iran, already at odds over Tehran's nuclear programme.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says Reiss, 24, is innocent. She was arrested in Tehran in July, during the turmoil that followed the election, as she prepared to leave Iran after a five-month stint working at the University of Isfahan.

(Reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Hashem Kalantari; writing by Fredrik Dahl; editing by Angus MacSwan)

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