President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said in interviews that Iran would release two US citizens imprisoned for spying in a “couple of days'” on bail, which their lawyer said had been set at $500,000 each. “I am helping to arrange for their release in a couple of days so they will be able to return home. This is of course going to be a unilateral humanitarian gesture,” Ahmadinejad told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “It is a unilateral pardon” of the hikers, he added. In a separate interview with the US network NBC, he said Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal would be released “in two days”, but their lawyer Masoud Shafiei said they would be freed only when the bail had been paid. Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were arrested in July 2009 near Iran’s border with Iraq, where they say they were hiking in the mountains. They were sentenced last month to eight years in prison on spying charges. A third American, Sarah Shourd, was freed in September 2010 and returned home. NBC, who interviewed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, said in a Twitter message that Ahmadinejad said Bauer and Fattal would be released in two days. The interview was due to air later on Tuesday on NBC’s Today show. Asked by the Post how the pair would return to the US, Ahmadinejad said that “they are free to choose”. Bauer, Fattal and Shourd say they were hiking in the mountains of northern Iraq and, if they crossed the unmarked border into Iran, it was by mistake. Shafiei said he informed the Swiss embassy, who represent US interests in Iran, on Tuesday of the decision. Shourd was previously freed on $500,000 bail. Bauer and Fattal, who share a cell in Tehran’s Evin prison, were convicted at a trial held behind closed doors in August. Their supporters say evidence against them has never been made public, and that the sentence came as a shock after hopes for their release had been boosted by positive comments from Iran’s foreign minister. US President Barack Obama has denied that the two men, who were working in the Middle East when they were detained, had any link to US intelligence. The affair has heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington, which severed diplomatic ties after the storming of the US embassy in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/09/201191393558221310.html