A US judge has dismissed sexual assault charges against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus dismissed the charges, formally ending the criminal case against him.
Strauss-Kahn appeared in court with his wife Anne Sinclair by his side and the pair left the hearing smiling, amid a throng of media.
He was not yet free to return to France, however, after the judge stayed his dismissal of the case for an emergency appeal.
A lawyer for the accuser, hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo, had requested a special prosecutor to continue the criminal case. Earlier, the judge dismissed the request.
But Diallo's lawyers appealed that decision. Obus said the appeal's court would rule on that later tonight, meaning Strauss-Kahn must await that verdict before he is free to return to France.
Prosecutors gave up hope they could convict Strauss-Kahn after losing confidence in Diallo, 32, a hotel maid from Guinea who alleged that Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her.
The motion recommending dismissal was filed at the court clerk's office yesterday and later was made available online.
The motion showed prosecutors 'no longer have confidence' that Strauss-Kahn is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt because the accusser's story kept shifting, and therefore urged the judge to drop all the charges against him.
'The nature and number of the complainant's falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever the truth may be about the encounter between the complainant and the defendant,' the papers said.
'If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt, we cannot ask a jury to do so,' they added.
Initially, prosecutors said the maid's account seemed 'plausible', 'truthful' and 'consistent' but she eventually gave them three different versions of the encounter. The motion was filed after a brief meeting between prosecutors, the maid and her lawyers, where Diallo was told the case would be dropped.
Lawyers for Strauss-Kahn, 62, welcomed the case being dropped. 'We have maintained from the beginning of this case that our client is innocent,' Strauss-Kahn's lawyers William Taylor and Benjamin Brafman said in a statement.
Strauss-Kahn still faces a civil lawsuit that Diallo filed against him on August 8 and a complaint from a French writer who said he tried to rape her during a 2003 interview.
