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Charges against one man accused in February of smuggling what authorities claimed were "conflict diamonds" and attempting to sell them in Tucson will be dropped.

Charges against a second will be reduced to a misdemeanor, under an agreement reached with federal prosecutors last week, court documents say.

Maliki Diane and Saoud Kouyate were arrested Feb. 4 after authorities alleged they tried to sell investigators uncut conflict diamonds during the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase.

At the time of the arrests, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they seized 11,000 carats of uncut diamonds from the two. The estimated values, at the time, ranged from about $250,000 to more than $2 million.

But Diane's defense attorney, Rosemary Marquez, said the diamonds were actually industrial-quality, a low-grade type of diamond used in dental drills and for stone-cutting, among other purposes. Marquez said she didn't know how much the seized diamonds were worth, but she said they were "incredibly cheap" and are often bought by the kilo.

Moreover, Marquez said cut diamonds from a completely different case were also somehow mixed in with the industrial-quality diamonds.

"First of all, they had included somebody else's cut diamonds from a different case in their report, and that significantly increased the value."

At the time of the arrests investigators called the stones "conflict diamonds," meaning their sale would have supported warring factions, often in Africa.

Prosecutors stood by that distinction. In an e-mail, Wyn Hornbuckle, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona, said the stones came from Africa and did not go through the Kimberley Process, guidelines adopted by more than 70 countries to document and certify imported diamonds will not be sold to support conflicts.

He said the value of the stones was about $220,000.

But Marquez said there was never any link establishing the stones as "conflict diamonds" because of their low quality.

"There was no way they could have proven that these diamonds required Kimberley Process certification," she said.

Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would not comment on Marquez's claims about evidential errors.

She did, however, say the agency will continue to investigate the illicit diamond trade, which some experts say is worth up to a billion dollars a year.

Diane, 60, originally from Sierra Leone, is now a U.S. citizen who lives in New Jersey.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor related to bringing goods into the United States by means of "false statements," according to court documents.

He will have one year of supervised release and will have to pay a fine that will not exceed $10,030.

Kouyate, 48, is a native of Guinea and is a resident of Madagascar, according to court documents.

Charges against him were dropped under the condition that he give up any claims to the diamonds, and that Diane plead guilty to the misdemeanor.

Federal officials did not answer a question about what will be done with the diamonds.