Washington (AFP) - The US Navy has halted a mission to accompany American-flagged vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the Pentagon said Wednesday, in a sign of reduced tensions in the strategic waterway.

The protection mission had been ordered last week after a Marshall Islands-flagged ship was seized by Iran's Revolutionary Guard forces and a US-flagged vessel was harassed.

The mission came to an end on Tuesday but US warships will remain in the area to conduct "routine maritime security operations," spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.

The US naval commander in the region "adjusts his mission based on his view of the conditions" and there had been "several days without incident," Warren said.

The order to accompany US-flagged vessels expired on Tuesday and commanders chose not to renew it, he said.

American warships began shadowing US-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, even as US and Iranian diplomats engaged in pivotal negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program.

While US officials would not use the term "escort", naval ships, including the guided-missile destroyer USS Farragut, were meant to keep an eye on US-flagged commercial vessels, following close enough to take action to secure their safe passage.

But US officials insisted the operation did not constitute a full-fledged escort as the warships were not directly next to the commercial vessels and on the same course.

The Pentagon had said the protection mission could be extended to other countries' vessels, including British-flagged commercial ships.

Iranian authorities said the Marshall Islands-flagged Maersk Tigris was confiscated because of a commercial dispute.

The Strait of Hormuz is often described as the world's most important oil export route. About 30 percent of all oil traded by sea moves through the narrow channel, or about 17 million barrels a day.

At its narrowest, the strait is 21 miles (33 kilometers) wide, but the width of the navigable shipping lane in each direction is only two miles -- separated by a two-mile buffer zone.

Strategists have long feared a miscalculation in the crowded channel could trigger a conflict.

In 2011, Iran threatened that it might close the strait in retaliation for tougher international sanctions. That prompted a warning from Washington that US forces would take action to keep shipping lanes open.

By Ian Simpson

(Reuters) - Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake asked the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday to investigate the city's police department for civil rights violations after the death of a black man from injuries sustained in police custody.

The investigation will look into police practices such as frisks, street stops of suspects and arrests to see if they violate the U.S. Constitution, Rawlings-Blake said at a news conference.

The request follows the April 19 death of Freddie Gray, 25, who sustained spinal injuries after being arrested. His death sparked protests and a day of arson and looting in the largely black city.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan lifted a state of emergency for Baltimore on Wednesday.

"We cannot be timid in addressing this problem and I am a mayor that does not shy away from our city's big challenges," Rawlings-Blake said.

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch (L) accompanied by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake speaks du …

Six officers were charged last week in the case, which involves the latest in a series of U.S. deaths of unarmed black men involving police officers.

The mayor said the city would seek to have its 3,200-member police department equipped with body cameras by the end of the year. Advocates see cameras as a way to monitor police encounters with civilians.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is considering Rawlings-Blake's request, the Justice Department said. Lynch met the mayor, police officials and community leaders on Tuesday.

Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat who took office in 2010, said the request was part of her years-long effort to reform police.

She said the department had made progress, with complaints last year of excessive force down by 46 percent. But improvements had not gone far enough, Rawlings-Blake said.

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A woman walks on Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore, May 5, 2015. REUTERS/Sait Serkan Gurbuz

Gray's death provoked a day of rioting on April 27 in which a number of businesses were looted and a CVS Health Corp location was burned. The pharmacy chain said on Wednesday that it would rebuild the store.

The Justice Department has conducted similar reviews of U.S. police departments. An investigation of police in Ferguson, Missouri, where an officer shot dead an unarmed black teenager last year, concluded in March that the department routinely engaged in racially biased practices.

The Justice Department is investigating possible civil rights violations in Gray's death.

Last October, officials in Baltimore asked the Justice Department to begin an informal collaborative review of the city's police department after the Baltimore Sun reported that Baltimore had paid almost $6 million since 2011 to settle lawsuits alleging police brutality and other misconduct.

The American Civil Liberties Union said on Wednesday that it had requested information about surveillance flights over Baltimore by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies that it said may have improperly surveilled and targeted the public.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ACLU statement.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott, Doina Chiacu, Toni Reinhold)

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is pictured in this handout photo presented as evidence by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston, Massachusetts on March 23, 2015. REUTERS/U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston/Handout via Reuters

By Richard Valdmanis

BOSTON (Reuters) - Lawyers seeking to spare convicted Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the death penalty called witnesses on Wednesday who described his volunteer work with disabled children, his respect for his older brother, and his father's mental illness in the years before the attack.

Tsarnaev, 21, was found guilty last month of killing three people and wounding 264 others by bombing the marathon’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, in one of the highest-profile attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. He was also convicted of killing a police officer three days later.

Defense lawyers are trying to persuade the jury in U.S. District Court in Boston to sentence Tsarnaev to life in prison without possibility of parole rather than death, asserting that he would not have bombed the marathon had it not been for his radical older brother.

The brother, 26-year-old boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed after a gunfight with police days after the bombing.

A longtime friend of Tsarnaev's family on Wednesday told the jury that Dzhokhar was a studious youth and adored Tamerlan, who had begun to cultivate a deep interest in Islam, politics and conspiracy theories before the 2013 attack.

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Defense attorney David Bruck presents his opening arguments during the first day of the defense' …

"Anytime Tamerlan would say 'Let's do this or that,' he would always go along. He would be a good younger brother, I would say," Elmirza Khozhugov told jurors via a remote video feed from Kazakhstan in Central Asia, where he now lives.

Khozhugov was married to the Tsarnaev's sister Ailina from 2006 to 2008 and cultivated a friendship with Tamerlan. He said Tamerlan started to change after an Armenian man named Misha began visiting the Tsarnaev family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk to him about Islam and politics.

"Conspiracy theories. He was getting into that a lot," Khozhugov said. Khozhugov said that at one point, Tamerlan gave up his favorite pastime, boxing, because Misha had told him that "in Islam hitting people on the head is not a good thing."

Prosecutors have argued Tsarnaev was an equal partner in the attack, citing Islamist propaganda found on his computer and a note he wrote that cast the bombing as retribution for U.S. military campaigns in predominantly Muslim countries.

Jurors also learned about the mental illness of Tsarnaev's father, Anzor, which progressed to the point where a doctor in 2012 said he required "constant supervision."

According to his medical records, which were read into evidence, Anzor often heard voices screaming his name, saw lizard-like creatures and animal faces, was paranoid, and could not sleep. He and Tsarnaev's mother later divorced.

At around this time, Tsarnaev was a volunteer in a program to help children with disabilities at the Winchester Public Schools, according to the program's leader Jennifer Callison.

"He was kind, he was respectful, he came to every event," Callison told the jury. Asked if she could have imagined Tsarnaev would bomb the marathon, she replied, "No."

Tsarnaev’s high school math teacher, Eric Traub, said he also remembered Tsarnaev as a kind person. He said he was “shocked” when he learned Tsarnaev was a suspect in the bombing. "It just didn’t make sense to me."

Martin Richard, 8, Chinese exchange student Lu Lingzi, 23, and restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, died in the bombing. The Tsarnaev brothers also shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier.

(Editing by Grant McCool)