RELEASE US HIKERS, RAMOS HORTA URGES IRAN

THE GULF TODAY – 02 mai 2011

JAKARTA: East Timorese president Jose Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, appealed on Sunday to Iran to release two American hikers arrested on the Iraqi border in 2009 and accused of espionage.

“It is hard for any of us to appreciate the torment these individuals and their families have suffered  since that fateful day,” Ramos-Horta, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a statement.

“It is harder still to fathom what Iran expects to gain by continuing to hold the two men in the group captive, with almost no contact with their families, and by putting them on trial on May 11 on the unfounded charge of espionage.”

He said Iran had summoned hiker Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s fiancee, back for the trial “even though a senior Iranian official, Mohammad Javad Larijani, has said publicly that she is incapable of spying.”

As a political exile, Ramos-Horta lobbied the world for an end to Indonesia’s brutal 1975-1999 military occupation of his tiny half-island state.

He has not previously been involved in the issue of the Iran detentions.

But he said he identified with the “idealistic young Americans” because they had a “history of involvement in causes in support of legitimate independence movements and the downtrodden.”