Tehran said on Monday that scientist Sirous Asgari, one of more than a dozen Iranians behind bars in the U.S., is set to return to the Islamic republic within days.
Mr. Asgari was accused by a U.S. court in 2016 of stealing trade secrets while on an academic visit to Ohio. But the 59-year-old scientist from Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology was acquitted in November.
The academic told British newspaper The Guardian in March that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was keeping him in a detention centre in Louisiana without basic sanitation and refusing to let him return to Iran despite his exoneration. “Dr. Sirous Asgari’s case has been closed in America and he will probably return to the country in the next two or three days,” said Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said last month that Mr. Asgari had contracted the novel coronavirus while in U.S. custody.
