In an interview last Wednesday, Sarah Shourd said a guard one day slammed Shane Bauer repeatedly against a cell wall until the back of his head was bloodied.
Shourd, who was freed last September, has previously been silent on the issue of treatment. But she spoke out for the first time in the interview on CBS’s “The Early Show.”
Shourd said the three hikers—Shourd, Bauer and Josh Fattal—were being escorted back to their cells from interrogation one day when “a guard just went crazy.”
She said, “They pushed Josh down the stairs and Shane back into his cell and me back into my cell. And then a guard came into Shane’s cell and just started slamming him against the wall.… The back of his head was bloodied.”
Shourd, 32, made it sound like the brutality was the action of an individual guard and did not represent a policy of abuse. She said nothing about any torture during questioning.
But she did say: “Prison is a very scary place. And you don’t know what’s going to happen on a day-to-day basis. And now that I’m on the outside, I constantly worry that that—or something worse—could happen to them.”
Shourd later flew to London where she was interviewed by The Times of London. The back-to-back interviews suggest a new effort to keep a fire lighted under the case in hopes of embarrassing Iran into freeing the two remaining hikers, who will mark their second anniversary in captivity July 31.
The Times of London treated the Iranian charges of espionage against the trio as obviously false. The paper noted that they were accused of trying to sneak into Iran but that Shourd was dressed in shorts!
The Times further commented: “The irony is the Iranians arrested and imprisoned three Americans of exactly the sort they would applaud—left-leaning, anti-war, pro-Palestinian.… The idea that they were spies is ridiculous. None spoke Farsi. They had one proper camera and a plastic compass between them. Shourd was wearing shorts, and the first thing their captors did was buy a hejab to cover her head.”
Shourd said, “They knew from the first minute we were just tourists.”
At Evin prison, their possessions were confiscated, even Shourd’s glasses. They were stripped and given prison clothes, including a black hejab for Shourd. “We were locking arms but they tore us apart,” she said.
She told The Times she never saw a lawyer at all during her 410 days in prison and was not charged until the day of her release.
For most of that time, she was held alone in a cell measuring 3m by 4.25m with one high window through which she could just see the sky. The lights were never turned off. She was blindfolded every time she was taken out of the cell, even to the toilet. Some of her guards—all women—hugged her and brought flowers or extra food, while others treated her with hatred, she said.
At first, she said she was so scared of rape or violence that she slept with a tin plate against the door so she would wake if it opened.
Only after three months was she was allowed any books or to see any of the letters her mother had been writing daily. She could not send any mail. Only after five months was she allowed regular 30-minute meetings with Bauer and Fattal.
That first winter she cried endlessly, beat the walls and screamed. “I was like a zombie. Every day was like the hardest of my life. There’s no way to explain how hard it was to get through that isolation,” she said.
For two months she was interrogated almost daily, several hours at a time, always blindfolded. Some interrogators were gentle, others menacing. One said: “Sarah, there are two roads you can take—one to hell and one to freedom. If you tell the truth, you can have freedom.”
Finally, an interrogator told her: “Sarah, your case has become political. Even though I know you’re innocent, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
With that, her hope evaporated. “It was the worst moment of my life. When I got back in my cell, I totally fell apart. I didn’t really eat or move for days.”
Another depressing moment came after the hikers’ mothers were allowed to visit them in May of last year. The three prisoners were given street clothes, taken to a luxury hotel suite filled with food and flowers and enjoyed an emotional reunion broadcast on Iranian TV.
It was “a way to dampen down the criticism,” Shourd said, “a misrepresentation of our conditions to make it look like we had special treatment.” When it was over, Shourd was returned to her cell.
“All the joy drained out of me. I cried all night long. I felt my heart was being torn out of my chest,… —to taste human contact and quasi-freedom and then have it taken away again.”
Soon after her release, she met President Ahmadi-nejad in his hotel while he was in New York for the UN General Assembly. He promised to press for leniency, telling her: “I know you’re good kids. I hope you are married soon and have lots of children.”