TEHRAN: A senior prosecutor said on Sunday that Iran will release US hiker Sarah Shourd on bail, as he criticized members of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government for interfering in judicial issues.
Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said that Shourd, one of three American hikers detained in Iran for more than a year for spying, had been granted bail on health grounds on a surety of around 500,000 dollars.
"For the female defendant (Shourd), bail has been set at five billion Iranian rials (around 500,000 US dollars)," the official IRNA news agency quoted Dolatabadi as telling reporters.
"She can be freed by posting the bail… Her lawyer has been informed," he said, adding that the decision was taken after "the judge confirmed Ms. Shourd’s illness."
Shourd’s mother Nora told AFP last month that her daughter was being held in solitary confinement despite suffering from a pre-cancerous cervical condition, a lump in her breast and depression.
Shourd was arrested with fellow hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal on July 31, 2009 after straying across the border from neighboring Iraq.
Iranian authorities have accused the three Americans of illegally entering the Islamic republic and of spying. But they insist they entered the country by mistake after getting lost during a trek in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Several Iranian officials had said on Thursday that Shourd would be released on Saturday. But legal technicalities delayed her release, Dolatabadi said on Friday.
Shourd’s release could ease tensions between Washington and Tehran, which have heightened in recent months over Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment program.
Her case has highlighted deep divisions between Ahmadinejad’s government and institutions run by traditional conservatives such as Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, who heads the judiciary.
Larijani last month hit out at Ahmadinejad over remarks he made about a separate legal case, while his brother, parliament speaker Ali Larijani, has repeatedly criticized the president over his handling of the economy.
On Sunday, Dolatabadi criticized the government directly, saying that "releasing information on judicial cases should not be done by government officials, and judicial authorities should handle it."
Iranian officials, including Ahmadinejad, had previously said the three Americans hikers could be swapped for Iranian citizens in US custody.
Talk of such an exchange had emerged when US authorities allowed the return home of an Iranian researcher Shahram Amiri who surfaced in Washington in July after disappearing in Saudi Arabia last year.
But the Fars news agency quoted Dolatabadi as saying that there was "no link" between Amiri’s case and that of the three US hikers.
He reiterated that the three hikers were accused of espionage.
"The case is nearly complete and the judge has issued an indictment for the three Americans accused of spying," he said, adding that Bauer and Fattal had been remanded in custody.
"It has been proven that they illegally entered through the Kurdistan border. Also the equipment and supplies they were carrying are only used for spying," the Mehr news agency quoted Dolatabadi as saying.
Washington and human rights watchdogs have repeatedly called on Iran to release the three hikers.
In May, Iran allowed visits to the trio by their mothers, and they later reported that Shourd and Bauer had become engaged while behind bars.
The website freethehikers.org gives Shourd’s age as 32, and says Bauer and Fattal are both 28.
The trios are not the first US nationals to be detained in Iran in recent years.
In April 2009, US-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi was freed after being held on espionage charges. US-Iranian scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who was arrested during protests over a presidential election last year, remains in custody.
Another American, Robert Levinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, went missing more than three years ago from the Kish island resort in the Gulf. Tehran says it has no information about his whereabouts.
