Mother Jones has released a statement from a traveling companion of the three Americans arrested in Iran last week detailing how the trio—one of whom is a freelancer for the magazine—accidentally wandered across the Iranian border.

Shane Bauer, one of the three detainees, has a story about corruption in federal contracting—completely unrelated to his travels to Iraq—in the forthcoming issue of Mother Jones. His friend Shon Meckfessel, who was with the three Americans in Iraqi Kurdistan, says they were simply sightseeing and hiked unwittingly into Iran.