By Safvan Allahverdi - AA - WASHINGTON - The judge in the trial of Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla announced late Monday that a jury of 12, including six alternates, had been selected. Earlier U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said Turkish businessman Riza Sarraf would not face trial. Instead, Atilla, the deputy CEO of Turkey’s Halkbank, will be the only defendant, Berman told jurors in Manhattan. Berman added that opening arguments will begin Tuesday morning for a trial due to last three to four weeks.

A Turkish gold trader charged with conspiring to evade US sanctions against Iran will not go on trial in New York this week. Reza Zarrab dropped out of sight in the two months leading up to his scheduled trial. However, there is widespread speculation that Zarrab has flipped and is now cooperating with the prosecution. He was abruptly released from prison in early November and his whereabouts are publically unknown.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Nov. 24 that the defense team and prosecutors failed to agree on a number of disputed issues in the case of Turkish-Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab and former Halkbank deputy general manager Mehmet Hakan Atilla. The court in New York announced its ruling on a total of 10 issues that should be agreed on regarding the case ahead of the election of the jury on Nov. 27. Judge Richard Berman accepted one of seven demands from the prosecution while denying all three demands from Atilla’s lawyers.

United States President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke on the phone on Nov. 24 only days after a Russia-Turkey-Iran summit on Syria, with Ankara saying that Washington has pledged not to send weapons to the People’s Protection Units (YPG) any more. “President Trump instructed [his generals] in a very open way that the YPG will no longer be given weapons. He openly said that this absurdity should have ended much earlier,” Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu told reporters after the phone call.