An American woman detained in Iran arrived back to the U.S. after more than a year.
Sarah Shourd touched down in Washington D.C. early this morning from Dubai, according to Shourd’s media spokeswoman, Samantha Topping.
Shourd then made her way to New York and held a press conference this afternoon. Shourd thanked the Iranian government and religious leaders for her release from Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.
“It is my deepest hope that the world will not let this humanitarian gesture … go unrecognized,” she said, reading from a prepared statement.
She also called on the government to release two fellow detained Americans, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, both of whom are still locked up in Evin.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told ABC’s “This Week” that his powers to release prisoners are limited, and that Fattal and Bauer would have to make their case in Iranian courts.
Shourd, Bauer and Fattal were arrested in in 2009 after they supposedly crossed an unmarked Iran-Iraq border while hiking in Kurdistan. The three were accused of espionage, and Shourd was held in solitary confinement.
Earlier this year Roxana Saberi, another woman accused of espionage by the Iranian government, was also released after almost a year. She wrote a book, called Between Two Worlds, documenting the conditions and circumstances surrounded her imprisonment.
Saberi told CNN that Shourd’s days in solitary confinement could have felt like her own; endless, fearful, uncertain and consumed with an anger toward God and those who held her in captivity.
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