Release of US Hiker by Iran.

September 14, 2010, 8:15 AM

U.S. Hiker Released in Iran, Her Lawyer Says

By ROBERT MACKEY

Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSarah Shourd, during her captivity in Iran, in May.

Updated | 9:01 a.m. Sarah Shourd, one of three American hikers held in Iran for more than a year, has been released from prison in Tehran and is en route to the Swiss embassy, according to her lawyer, Reuters reports.

“I am inside Evin prison, doing her paperwork. She has been released and is heading towards the Swiss Embassy,” Ms. Shourd’s lawyer, Masoud Shafie, told Reuters from the jail where she had been held.

Ms. Shourd and two male companions, Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, were arrested near Iran’s border with Iraq in July 2009. Their families say they were on a mountain hike in northern Iraq at the time of their arrest. Iran has suggested they were spying.

Lara Setrakian of ABC News adds that Iranian state television said that Ms. Shourd had been released.

Press TV, Iran’s state-run English-language satellite channel flashed a banner headline reading, “Iran has released U.S. national Sarah Shourd,” The Associated Press reports.

A report on Press TV’s Web site says:

Iran has released American national Sarah Shourd on a bail of $500,000, 14 months after she was arrested with two other Americans for illegally entering the country.

The Tehran prosecutor announced on Tuesday that Shourd, 31, was handed over to officials at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran which represents US interests.

“The case inspector informed the Tehran prosecutor of a bank guarantee concerning the posting of bail and after the prosecutor’s agreement, he issued the order for her freedom,” the prosecutor’s website said.

Shourd, 31, Shane Michael Bauer and Joshua Felix Fattal, both 27, were arrested in July 2009 after illegally crossing the border from the mountains of Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

The three Americans were charged with espionage after the Tehran prosecutor found “compelling evidence” that the trio had been cooperating with US intelligence agencies.

The decision comes after the Islamic Republic earlier called off the release of Shourd over unresolved legal issues.

Bauer and Fattal will remain in jail and the trio will have to stand trial for espionage.

As my colleague Jack Healy reported on Monday, Ms. Shourd’s family said that it could not afford to pay the $500,000 bail set by Iran and was asking to have it reduced, her Iranian lawyer told The Associated Press.

Mr. Shafie said on Monday that Swiss officials, who represent American interests in Iran, were making the plea for officials to reduce the bail for Ms. Shourd.

P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman told reporters in Washington on Monday, “The United States Government does not fund prisoner bail.”

In June, an investigative report by The Nation magazine — which has published work by one of the hikers, Mr. Fattal, in the past — suggested that the three Americans had not crossed into Iran but were arrested by Iranian authorities inside Iraq.

Here is Esther Kaplan, the editor of the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, explaining what their journalists, working in Iran and Iraq, reported: