BREAKING: American journalist jailed by the military dictatorship Myanmar for nearly 6 months and given an 11 year sentence has been freed

American journalist Danny Fenster, who spent nearly six months in jail in military-ruled Myanmar and was facing a sentence of 11 years of hard labor, was freed Monday and is on his way home.

Fenster was handed over to former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson, who helped negotiate the release, and the two landed in Doha, Qatar.

“I’m feeling all right physically,” a bearded Fenster, in baggy drawstring pants and a hat, said on the tarmac in comments carried by the Al Jazeera network. While still jailed, Fenster told his lawyer that he believed he had COVID-19, though prison authorities denied that.

Fenster, the managing editor of online magazine Frontier Myanmar, was convicted Friday of spreading false or inflammatory information, contacting illegal organizations and violating visa regulations. He is one of more than 100 journalists, media officials or publishers who have been detained since the military ousted the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in February, and his was the harshest sentence yet.

“This is the day that you hope will come when you do this work,” Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico and past ambassador to the U.N., said in a statement emailed by his office. “We are so grateful that Danny will finally be able to reconnect with his loved ones, who have been advocating for him all this time, against immense odds.”

Fenster has been in detention since he was arrested at Yangon International Airport on May 24 as he was headed to the Detroit area to see his family.

“We are overjoyed that Danny has been released and is on his way home — we cannot wait to hold him in our arms,” his family said in a statement. “We are tremendously grateful to all the people who have helped secure his release, especially Ambassador Richardson, as well as our friends and the public who have expressed their support and stood by our sides as we endured these long and difficult months.”

“The Burmese generals were convinced that it wasn’t worth it to hang on to Danny,” U.S. Rep. Andy Levin of Michigan, who represents the Fenster family in Congress, told Detroit radio station WWJ. “He was innocent and he was just an annoyance for them. If they kept him and anything really happened to him, we would never forget it. We would never forgive them.”

Richardson said he discussed Fenster’s release during a recent visit to Myanmar when he held face-to-face negotiations with Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the country’s dictator.

Richardson is best known for traveling to nations with which Washington has poor, if any, relations — such as North Korea — to obtain the freedom of detained Americans.

[link to apnews.com (secure)]