Tehran's prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said the release of the hiker has nothing to do with the case of Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri.

"We do not make any link between the two issues, Iranian judiciary fulfills its missions and only focuses on judicial issues," Dolatabadi was quoted by ISNA as saying.

In July, the 32-year-old Iranian scholar Shahram Amiri, who once worked at Iran's Malek Ashtar University and was missing on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia last year, arrived at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport from the United States.

Media reports said that the scholar was released by the United States in exchange for the three American hikers who were arrested in Iran on July 31 last year for illegally entering the country from its western borders and were charged with espionage.

The U.S. government considered the charges totally unfounded and urged Iran to release all the three detained American hikers " on humanitarian grounds for many, many months."

"The hikers' release is long overdue," said Mark Toner, spokesman of the U.S. state department.

In May, mothers of the three Americans were allowed by the Iranian government to meet their children briefly in Tehran.

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