One year later, future of American hikers in Iran remains unclear

One year ago this week, three Americans trekking in northern Iraq near the Iranian border were arrested and locked up in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, accused of entering Iran illegally.

Despite extensive public attention, the efforts and support of high-level U.S. officials and other prominent figures, and a visit to Tehran by the trio's mothers, the friends widely known as "the American hikers" remain in limbo - even as other foreigners detained in Iran in recent years have generally been freed within weeks or months.

The fact that the hikers were arrested just six weeks after violent antigovernment street protests erupted in Tehran, and against the backdrop of U.S.-led pressure to curtail Iran's nuclear fuel-enrichment program, made them particularly vulnerable as political pawns, analysts say.

"The timing could not have been worse. They entered Iran at a very, very bad time" in terms of suspicions about outsiders, said Hooshang Amirahmadi, the Iranian-born director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. "The streets were in the hands of the youth, and suddenly these American kids appear on the border."

The State Department and the hikers' families say that Joshua Fattal, 28, a Cheltenham High School graduate; Shane Bauer, 28, of Minnesota; and Sarah Shourd, 31, of California, were vacationing in a mountainous resort area of northern Iraq and strayed across the unmarked frontier or were grabbed in disputed territory July 31.

Iranian prosecutors contend the trio entered the Islamic Republic to stir up resistance to its regime and to commit espionage - though to this day they have not been formally charged with any crime.

"The evidence on the public record is very compelling, if not irrefutable, that these young people were hiking and had no ill will or intentions," said Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.), who on a recent trip to the Middle East asked Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammad al-Sabah to try to intervene.

"The same regime that has defied the world on its nuclear program has been unwilling to allow these individuals to have any kind of a hearing or process to make an expedited determination of their status," Casey said.

That, Amirahmadi said, is because "this is not a legal case, this is not a criminal case, this is a purely political case."