US journalist jailed in Myanmar for nearly 6 months is freed

American journalist Danny Fenster, who was recently sentenced to 11 years of hard labor after spending nearly six months in jail in military-ruled Myanmar, was freed and on his way home Monday, a former U.S. diplomat who helped negotiate the release said.

Fenster, the managing editor of the online magazine Frontier Myanmar, was convicted Friday of spreading false or inflammatory information, contacting illegal organizations and violating visa regulations. His sentence was the harshest yet among the seven journalists known to have been convicted since the military ousted the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in February.

“This is the day that you hope will come when you do this work,” Bill 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.”