US prosecutors have dropped charges against a Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-laced letters to Barack Obama and a US senator, according to a court order signed by a judge on Tuesday.

The move came hours after Paul Kevin Curtis was released from a Mississippi jail on bond. In a court order calling for the charges to be dismissed, prosecutors said the “ongoing investigation has revealed new information” without providing any additional detail. An FBI agent had testified in court that no evidence of ricin was found at Curtis’s home.

Meanwhile, authorities searched the home of another Mississippi man on Tuesday in connection with the case.

Curtis said afterwards that he respected Obama and would never harm a public servant. “I love this country,” he said. The release of Curtis, 45, on bond came shortly after a judge indefinitely postponed a court hearing on his detention.

Christi McCoy, Curtis’s attorney, told CNN she believed her client had been framed. A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Oxford, Mississippi did not return calls for comment.

“I do believe someone who was familiar and is familiar with Kevin just simply took his personal information and did this to him,” McCoy told CNN. “It is absolutely horrific that someone would do this.”

Curtis was arrested last Wednesday at his home in Corinth, Mississippi. He was charged with mailing letters to Obama, US senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and a state judge containing a substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin, a highly lethal poison made from castor beans.

The letters were intercepted by authorities before they reached their destinations but the poison scare put Washington on edge during the same week the Boston Marathon bombings occurred.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/23/ricin-letters-drops-charges-mississippi