JOIN US“I think these two persons will be freed in a couple of days,” the Iranian leader said through an interpreter in an interview broadcast on NBC’s Today show. “We do it, for example, in a humanitarian gesture.”
Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were sentenced in Iran last month to eight years in prison.
They had been arrested in July 2009 near Iran’s border with Iraq, where they say they were hiking in the mountains as tourists, along with a third American, Sarah Shourd.
Bauer and Fattal were convicted last month and share a cell in Tehran’s Evin prison. Shourd was allowed to go home after being freed on $5,00,000 bail in 2010.
Washington has denied they were spies. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was encouraged by Ahmadinejad’s remarks.
“We have followed this very closely and we are encouraged by what the Iranian government has said today,” she told reporters. “We obviously hope that we will see a positive outcome from what appears to be a decision by the government.”