By Shamil Baigin

TASHKENT, May 3 (Reuters) - Uzbekistan's government defended on Thursday the jailing of a translator and journalist who worked for a human rights group while Europe's main rights watchdog said the sentence was "cruel".

The United States has also criticised the sentence against Umida Niyazova, saying it was disturbed by the "politically-motivated" trial and called on the government of Uzbekistan to respect human rights. A court in the capital Tashkent sentenced Niyazova, 32, to seven years in prison on Tuesday for charges including "preparing or disseminating material containing a threat to security and order", Uzbekistan's Foreign Ministry said.

Niyazova had written news stories about the killing by government troops of protesters in the Uzbek town of Andizhan in May 2005, an incident the government says was a police action against what it calls Islamist "terrorists and bandits".

The Andizhan killings prompted a European Union arms embargo and other sanctions against the authoritarian Central Asian state, which the bloc may decide to lift this month if it thinks Uzbekistan has made progress on human rights.

Reporters and foreign diplomats were not able to attend the two-day trial, the outcome of which was reported by Niyazova's lawyer and a representative for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group for which she worked as a translator.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a 56-member rights and security group of which Uzbekistan is a member, condemned the sentence.

"Niyazova is a young mother of a two-year old son, and this makes the sentence especially cruel for someone who did nothing but exercised her right to inform society," OSCE media freedom representative Miklos Haraszti said in a statement.

The Foreign Ministry said in its statement that Niyazova's case had been heard in open court.

It said that during the investigation it had also become apparent that she had used funds from foreign diplomatic missions to finance various unnamed non-governmental organisations working without official registration.

"These facts, according to international law, cannot but be viewed as an attempt at interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state," the statement said.

Niyazova has been held in detention since her arrest in January when she entered Uzbekistan from Kyrgyzstan without her Uzbek passport, which had previously been confiscated.

Amnesty International has called her a prisoner of conscience. Human Rights Watch said material on Niyazova's computer that was deemed "extremist" by the prosecution was a Human Rights Watch report on the Andizhan killings and an article by an independent Uzbek journalist.

Last week another witness to the Andizhan killings, local human rights activist Gulbahor Turayeva, was jailed for six years. She had reported seeing 500 bodies including those of women and children. The government says 187 people died, all of them either "terrorists" or government security forces.

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