DUBAI • Iran has captured 17 spies working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and some have been sentenced to death, Iranian media reported yesterday.

State television quoted the Intelligence Ministry as saying that it had broken up a CIA spy ring and captured 17 suspects.

A ministry official said some of those arrested had been sentenced to death, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

The move comes after three months of spiralling confrontation with the West that began when new tighter United States sanctions took effect at the start of May.

"The identified spies were employed in sensitive and vital private sector centres in the economic, nuclear, infrastructural, military and cyber areas... where they collected classified information," said a ministry statement read on state television.

Yesterday, US President Donald Trump denied that Iran had arrested 17 people whom it accused of being CIA spies. "The report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false," he said.

It was not immediately clear if the reported arrests were linked to the case in which Iran said last month that it had exposed a large cyber espionage network it alleged was run by the CIA, and that several US spies had been arrested in different countries as a result of this.