A proposal made in Tehran’s Evin Prison led to a San Francisco wedding for two recently freed UC Berkeley alumni.
With Josh Fattal – the third detained hiker and a former UC Berkeley student – acting as best man, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd wed in a private ceremony last Saturday, said San Francisco attorney and family friend Ben Rosenfeld in a report by the Associated Press.
Rosenfeld said that about 200 people attended the “beautiful ceremony,” held at a location “chosen for its pastoral beauty,” according to the Associated Press.
Bauer, Fattal and Shourd were detained in Evin Prison in July 2009 after they were stopped by border police while hiking along the Iran-Iraq border. While in prison, Bauer proposed to Shourd with a ring he wove together using threads from his shirt, according to ABC News.
Shourd said in a lecture at UC Berkeley in June that the three were hiking in the Kurdistan province of Iraq — an area frequented by tourists — when an Iranian soldier saw them and gestured for them to step off of their hiking trail. He then pointed to the trail and said “Iraq” and pointed to the spot where they now stood and said “Iran,” indicating they had unknowingly crossed the border.
While Shourd was released on $500,000 bail in September 2010 on humanitarian grounds after finding a lump in her left breast, Bauer and Fattal were convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison.
The conviction was widely condemned by world leaders as being unnecessarily harsh.
Though they initially received five years imprisonment for espionage and three additional years for allegedly entering the country illegally, the two men were released following a pardon by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September 2011 after more than two years in detention.
Speaking on campus in June 2011, Shourd said, “Our plans for the future, our home where we had been living … all of our possessions and even the clothes on our backs were taken from us in one fell swoop.”
In a statement posted on Facebook, Bauer said getting engaged to Shourd while they were in captivity allowed him to dream of a future that was not only secure, but also beautiful, according to ABC News.
The newlyweds will return from their honeymoon on May 18 and will continue to live in the Bay Area, according to ABC News.
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Were these people undercover agents for the globalists? I’ll bet they were…need to fill up MSM with meaningless stories to avoid any real news
They were charged for being spies. Spies dress in American clothes, legitimate American passports, with no spy equipment, and not even being close to any sensitive areas. They were not pardoned, they were released on bail. What’s up with this article article? Be honest. It was a kidnapping, they were hostages of the Islamic Republic, and a ransom had to be paid.
Since you brought it up, what did they learn from their experience? The three American hikers were Palestine Solidarity Movement activists. Remember that the Hamas Charter states that it intends to obliterate Israel and replace it with an Islamic Republic, and with the full support from Iran. The three hikers have now been educated as to how an Islamic Republic legal system works. So what was the message in this article?
the headline should also include “according to ABC news”