Moms Again Reunite With 3 Americans Held in Iran

Laura Fattal of Elkins Park, Pa., and the mothers of the other two Americans jailed in Iran got to see their children a second time on Friday as Iranian authorities used their visit to underline their complaints about their own citizens detained by the United States.

The mothers are on a visit to Iran in hopes of securing the release of their children--Sarah Shourd, 31; her boyfriend, Shane Bauer, 27; and their friend Josh Fattal, 27, who have been accused by Iran of espionage and entering the country illegally after being detained on the porous border with Iraq last July.

Their relatives say the three were simply hiking in Iraq's scenic and largely peaceful mountainous northern Kurdish region.

The three were brought Friday afternoon to the high-rise Estaghlal hotel in Tehran and taken to the rooms where their mothers are staying for a private meeting, witnesses at the hotel said. The hotel overlooks Evin Prison, where the trio has been held.

No cameras or media were allowed to cover the meeting, unlike an emotional reunion the day before at the hotel--their first since the arrests--when the three young Americans and their mothers embraced and sat together for nearly four hours.

So far, Iranian authorities have given no indication that Shourd, Bauer and Fattal could be released, or that their mothers would even be allowed to make a face-to-face appeal to top Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as they have hoped.

One small glimmer of hope came in a state TV report that the American military in Iraq has released two Iranians detained for entering Iraq without a passport. The two--Ahmad Barazandeh and Ali Abdolmaleki--have been held for seven and two years, respectively, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad was quoted by the report as saying. Iraqi and U.S. officials in Baghdad could not immediately confirm the report.

The TV report made no connection between the release and the case of the three Americans.

But Iran has hinted in the past that it wants to swap the three Americans for Iranians being held by the United States. There have been hints of such swaps in a past case. In 2009, U.S. forces in Iraq freed five Iranians who had been detained since 2007 on suspicion of aiding Shiite militants, and their release came several months after Iran freed an Iranian-American journalist,
Rozana Saberi, who had been arrested in early 2009 and accused of espionage.

The detention of the three Americans has become intertwined with Iran’s accusations that the United States is unfairly holding a number of Iranians in custody.

Since their arrest, Iran has been demanding the U.S. free a number of Iranians--including several who have been tried and sentenced in the United States for trying to arrange illegal sales to Iran. Also among them is a nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, who disappeared during a visit last year to Saudi Arabia, raising speculation he defected to the West.

To underscore the connection, the mothers of the five Iranians released by the Americans in 2009 were brought to the hotel on Friday to meet with the Americans' mothers, Nora Shourd, Cindy Hickey and Laura Fattal.

In the meeting, aired in part on state TV, the Iranian women pointedly said American officials never gave them the chance to see their loved ones while they were held in Iraq. The women also claimed their sons were mistreated in U.S. custody.

The Americans’ fate could also be caught up in Iran's brinksmanship with the West over Tehran's disputed nuclear program and a U.S.-led push for harsher sanctions. Just before the American mothers’ arrival in Tehran, Washington said it had won support from other major powers for a new set of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran over its refusal to stop uranium enrichment.

The three Americans’ Iranian lawyer, Masoud Shafii, on Thursday predicted it was “very unlikely” that the jailed Americans would be allowed to return home with their mothers because the case has not yet reached the courts.

But he said in an interview with AP Television News that decisions could be made outside the normal legal framework and that “anything can happen.”

Iran granted the women visas to visit their children in what it called an “Islamic humanitarian gesture” and the Americans appealed to them to release the three on the same grounds.

At the trio's meeting with their mothers on Thursday, Josh Fattal told reporters, “We hope we're going home soon, maybe with our mothers.”
The meeting was heavily covered by Iran's state-run Press TV, the government's main English-language broadcast arm. Reporters for the foreign media also were allowed their first glimpse of the three Americans.

They appeared healthy, wearing jeans and polo-style shirts. Sarah Shourd wore a maroon-colored head scarf. They described their routines behind bars and the small things that take on major significance: being allowed books, letters from home, the ability for some exercise and the one hour each day they are all together.

The last direct contact with their families was a five-minute phone call in March.

Hickey lives in Minnesota, Shourd is from Oakland, California, and Fattal is from suburban Philadelphia.