The US Justice Department has asked a court to dismiss its case against Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School accused of bringing frog embryos into the country illegally, Meduza reports. Prosecutors said the cost of continuing the prosecution outweighed the public interest in seeing it resolved.
The request followed demands from her lawyers for details of how she came to be detained and of other cases in which travellers brought in undeclared biological samples. Petrova was stopped in February while returning from France, when embryos were found in her luggage; she said she had not known they needed to be declared. She was charged with smuggling, which carries up to 20 years in prison, and later with making false statements. She had warned that deportation to Russia could put her at risk because she had spoken out against the war in Ukraine.
Source: Meduza