The vacationing Fattal, a Cheltenham High School graduate, was hiking near a waterfall in a resort area of Iraqi Kurdistan on July 31, 2009, when he, Bauer, and companion Sarah Shourd, 32, were arrested by border guards. Iran said the trio had entered illegally. The hikers said that if they had crossed the craggy, unmarked frontier, it was unintentional.
"To this day, when people ask me how long I thought this would last, I say, '48 hours,' " said Laura Fattal, of Elkins Park, who has campaigned relentlessly for her son's release. "Forty-eight hours? It's like, now, what? Fourteen months?"
Shourd, reportedly suffering serious medical problems, was freed last month in what Iran characterized as a humanitarian gesture.
Though Fattal and Bauer have not been held in Iran for as long as the 29 months that Iranian American businessman Reza Taghavi, 71, was detained before he was freed over the weekend, the two remain accused of a serious charge - espionage - and their fate is uncertain.
Iran's intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, told a state-run news agency Friday that the two "must await trial."
U.S. officials have repeatedly denied that the two are spies and said they should be released immediately.
Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, recently wrote to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, asking him to let the hikers go as an act of Islamic compassion.
A former Pakistani diplomat, Ahmed spoke in a recent interview about the dangers that routinely confront embassy personnel, who know they are "lightning rods."
"But to pick up three kids who are blatantly out there as hikers . . . and to hold them officially for a length of time now equaling the captivity of the American hostages" is abusive, he said.
