Politico:
Federal prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against two more individuals linked to a prisoner swap deal with Iran announced by the Trump administration on Saturday.
An Atlanta-based federal judge on Wednesday dismissed the sanctions-violation cases against scientists Mahboobe Ghaedi and Maryam Jazayeri.
Both women were co-defendants in the prosecution of Masoud Soleimani, a renowned Iranian stem-cell researcher who was arrested last year in the U.S. on charges of arranging the export of human growth factors to his home country.
Jazayeri was carrying the vials when they were seized from her as she boarded a flight in Atlanta in 2016. Ghaedi, a Yale researcher at the time, was accused of helping arrange the transfer of the biological materials.
The case against Soleimani was abruptly dismissed over the weekend as part of a prisoner-swap agreement that saw him whisked to Zurich, to be traded for Xiyue Wang, an American graduate student who had been serving a 10-year prison term in Iran for espionage.
No mention was made at the time of what would befall Ghaedi and Jazayeri, former students of Soleimani.
The dismissal came one day after Ghaedi was set to go before a federal judge in Atlanta to plead guilty as part of a plea deal worked out before the prisoner swap was finalized. The hearing never took place.
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