American Released From Iran Says He Feels ‘Alive For First Time’

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian made a brief appearance outside the US military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where he’s being treated along with two other Americans who were just freed by Iran in a prisoner exchange.

AP Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine from Flint, Michigan was released by Tehran with Jason Rezaian and Saeed Adedini and flown to Geneva on Sunday before leaving for Landstuhl military base.

“Hearing about some of my fellow Marines supporting me, really gave me the strength to put up with over four years of some very hard times that me and my family went through”, Hekmati said.

“I feel alive for the first time”.

Hekmati went on to say that he had reached a point in his captivity where he had resigned himself to spending 10 years in prison.

“As soon as we got out of Iranian air space the champagne bottles were popped”, he said, adding that the Swiss served them veal and chocolates. But even as the Americans were being freed, the detention of Rezaian’s wife and mother introduced a sudden twist that caused a flurry of diplomatic maneuvering and a drama that one USA official compared to the movie Argo, in which six Americans were spirited out of Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979-81.

Hekmati, an Iranian-American, was arrested in 2011 on spying charges while visiting his grandmother.

“We will be committed to the fact that our nuclear program is peaceful and will never deviate to weapons”, he told Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in a meeting in Tehran, the Mehr News Agency reported.

“Think about a person who spent four-and-a-half years much of it in solitary confinement”, said Kildee.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that a delay in the departure of the plane taking some of the detainees from Iran was partly due to a “temporary misunderstanding” about whether Rezaian’s mother, Mary, and his wife, who is also a journalist, were on the plane, as had been agreed.

“It was very nerve-wracking”, Hekmati said. It said they have used front companies to deceive foreign suppliers about the true end-users of “sensitive goods for missile proliferation”. “They just came one morning and said ‘pack your things, ‘” he said. “This has really been an exceptional time for me”. Brett McGurk, the American in charge of the negotiations, refused and insisted that Rezaian’s family members be permitted to leave.

An appeals court later commuted the sentence to a 10-year jail term. Separately, a fifth American, student Matthew Trevithick, was also released.

Hekmati’s sister, Sarah Hekmati, told reporters she was upbeat as she arrived earlier Monday at Frankfurt airport before heading toward the Landstuhl medical center.

“Expressions by some US politicians in recent days are a matter of pessimism”, Khamenei said without elaborating.

“I was anxious that maybe the Iranian side was going to make new demands at the last minute or that the deal wasn’t going to work out, so up until the last second we were all anxious and concerned”, he said.

The fourth freed Iranian-American, named as Mr Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, apparently chose to remain in Iran.