Back from Iran, Elkins Park's Laura Fattal works to get son released

Three weeks after the failed mission to free her son Josh from an Iranian prison, Laura Fattal, of Elkins Park, is relentlessly on message, plotting new strategies and addressing criticisms that he put himself in harm's way.

"Iran says the investigation is ongoing," she said in her first detailed interview since her 48 hours in Tehran. "If it is, please conclude it. Let our kids speak with their lawyer and go to trial. They will more than defend themselves."

Josh Fattal, 28, and his friends Shane Bauer, 27, and Sarah Shourd, 31, were arrested 10 months ago for entering Iran across its mountainous border with northern Iraq. While the three have not been formally arraigned, some Iranian officials have accused them of espionage. The secretary-general of Iran's human-rights council said Friday that they could be charged and tried soon.

Fattal, 57, put a career as an art professor on hold to devote herself to her son's liberation. For more than 10 months, against the backdrop of increasingly strident U.S.-Iranian flare-ups, she has focused unerringly on the welfare of her youngest son, jailed 6,100 miles from Philadelphia by an avowed enemy of America. A less disciplined person might have cracked.

"People tell me, 'Laura, it's going to be a year,' " she said. "But I don't see that. I am really on this one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing."

The one time she indulged the urge to get ahead of herself was in January, after applying for a visa to Iran, when she began assembling Josh's "clothes for release" - khaki trousers, a blue Oxford shirt, a beige sweater, socks, and underwear.

In the hours before her flight to Tehran, she folded and packed them in plastic bags. Now if only he would need them.

On vacation

Fattal and the mothers of Bauer and Shourd say their children were on vacation in the relatively safe and scenic part of Iraq called Kurdistan, where they were trekking, not spying. If they entered Iran, it was accidental.