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US brokers release of three Americans it says were wrongly detained in China

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US brokers release of three Americans it says were wrongly detained in China

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Three Americans wrongfully detained in China for many years were released in a prisoner swap between Washington and Beijing, the White House said in a statement on Wednesday.

The three Americans were named as Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung. The Chinese nationals were not named. The development was first reported by Politico. China claimed the cases were handled according to its laws.

Their release comes fewer than two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office and represents a kind of late political victory for President Joe Biden just a day after his administration helped broker a cease-fire agreement in the Middle East between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Politico said the deal had taken years to finalize. In his first term, Trump helped reinvigorate what the U.S. State Department calls wrongfully detained persons − Americans held overseas by foreign governments where they languish in prisons or detention camps despite not having committed any crime, typically as a bargaining-chip.

An American is detained overseas: What happens next? Call President Trump?

Swidan, 49, was detained in 2012 and later convicted on drug-related charges that a United Nations rights group described as baseless. Li, 70, was detained in 2016 and later sentenced on espionage charges, which his family and the U.S. State Department said were baseless. Leung, 79, was detained in 2021 on trumpeted up spying charges.

It was not clear if all three men were now back on U.S. soil. Leung lived in Hong Kong at the time of his arrest.

In recent years the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affair has brought home more than 70 Americans from countries including Russia, Venezuela, Gaza, Haiti and Iran.

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In September, China freed U.S. pastor David Lin, who had been in jail since 2006.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan were released from Russian custody in August as part of a six-nation deal that was the biggest prisoner exchange between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War. A U.S. official said that Biden had pressed for the return of the three newly freed Americans when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping this month at a regional summit in Peru.

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