Two Americans held for more than two years in an Iranian prison on
accusations of spying returned to the U.S. Sunday, ending a diplomatic
ordeal that began with what they called a wrong turn into the wrong
country.
At a press conference in New York on Sunday, Josh
Fattal, one of the hostages, said they had been incarcerated simply
because of the the Iranian regime’s “political dispute with the United
States.”
He said that, even though the Iranian government had
released them, Iranian lawmakers “do not deserve undue credit for ending
what they had no right or justification to do in the first place.”
Shane Bauer lashed out at the Iranian regime for it’s autocratic rule and intolerance of dissent.
Fattal and Bauer, both 29, were freed last week under a $1 million bail deal and arrived Wednesday in Oman, greeted by relatives and fellow hiker Sarah Shourd, who was released last year.
Saga began in 2009
Their saga began in July 2009 with what they called a wrong turn into the wrong country. The three were hiking together in Iraq’s relatively peaceful Kurdish region along the Iran-Iraq border when Iranian guards detained them. They always maintained their innocence, saying they might have accidentally wandered into Iran.
The two men were convicted of spying last month. Shourd, whom Bauer proposed marriage to while they were imprisoned, was charged but freed before any trial.
The two countries severed diplomatic ties three decades ago during the hostage crisis that began with the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Since then, each country has tried to limit the other’s influence in the Middle East, and the United States and other Western nations see Iran as the greatest nuclear threat in the region.
The detention of the hikers, Bauer said, was “never about crossing the unmarked border between Iran and Iraq. We were held because of our nationality.”
He said they don’t know whether they had crossed the border. “We will probably never know.”
The irony of it all, he said, “is that Sarah, Josh and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.”
The men read their statements at a news conference Sunday in New York. They said they wouldn’t take questions from reporters.
The two also told of difficult prison conditions, where they were held in near isolation.
“Many times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do to help them,” said Fattal. “How can we forgive the Iranian government when it continues to imprison so many other innocent people and prisoners of conscience?”
They said their phone calls with family members amounted to a total of 15 minutes in two years, and they had to go on repeated hunger strikes to receive letters. Eventually, they were told – falsely – that their families had stopped writing them letters.
“We lived in a world of lies and false hope,” Fattal said.
Fattal called their release a total surprise.
On Wednesday, he said, they had just finished their brief daily open-air exercise and expected, as on other days, to be blindfolded and led back to their 8- by 13-foot (2.4- by 3.9-meter) cell.
Instead, the prison guards took them downstairs, fingerprinted them and gave them civilian clothes. They weren’t told where they were going.
The guards led them to another part of the prison, where they met a diplomatic envoy from Oman.
His first words to them? “Let’s go home.”
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With files from The Associated Press
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