Iran’s president has predicted that two Americans arrested while hiking along the Iraq-Iran border and sentenced to eight years in jail on espionage-related charges could be freed “in a couple of days” after a court set bail of US$500,000 each.
The events appeared timed to boost the image of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coinciding with his visit to New York next week for the UN General Assembly session. Last year, a third American was released on bail around the same time.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the US was “encouraged” by Ahmadinejad’s comments on Tuesday about freeing Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal.
“We obviously hope that we will see a positive outcome from what appears to be a decision by the government,” Clinton said at the State Department.
The families of Bauer and Fattal said in a statement that they were “overjoyed” by the reports from Iran.
Lawyer Masoud Shafiei said the court would begin the process to free Bauer and Fattal after payment of the bail, which must be arranged through third parties because of US economic sanctions on Iran. The timing of the court’s decision is similar to last year’s bail deal mediated by the Gulf state of Oman that freed a third American, Sarah Shourd.
“They accepted to set bail to release,” Shafiei said after leaving court. “The amount is the same for Sarah.”
Ahmadinejad, in an interview aired on NBC’s Today show, predicted the Americans could be freed “in a couple of days.”
He described the bail offer as a “humanitarian gesture” and repeated complaints about attention for Iranians held in US prisons.
The Americans were arrested in July 2009 along the border and accused by Iran of espionage. The trio have denied the charges and say they may have mistakenly crossed into Iran when they stepped off a dirt road while hiking near a waterfall in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
Last month, Bauer and Fattal, both 29, were sentenced to three years each for illegal entry into Iran and five years each for spying for the US. They appealed the verdicts. Shourd’s case remains open.
Shafiei said he has passed along details of the court’s decision to the Swiss embassy, which represents US interests in Iran because there are no diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington.
US Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said officials were in touch with Swiss envoys “to get more details from the Iranian authorities.”
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