Bangkok: American journalist Danny Fenster, sentenced only days ago to 11 years hard labour in Myanmar, has been freed. Danny Fenster is on his way home, former US Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson said Monday. Richardson said in a statement that Fenster had been handed over to him in Myanmar and would return to the US via Qatar over the next day-and-a-half.
“This is the day that you hope will come when you do this work,” Richardson said in a statement emailed from his office. “We are so grateful that Fenster will finally be able to reconnect with his loved ones. They have been advocating for him all this time, against immense odds,” said Richardson.
Fenster was the managing editor of the online magazine ‘Frontier Myanmar’. He was convicted Friday of spreading false or inflammatory information, contacting illegal organisations and violating visa regulations.
Fenster’s sentence was the harshest punishment among the seven journalists known to have been convicted since the military took power.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price had condemned the decision. He had said in a statement that it was ‘an unjust conviction of an innocent person’.
Richardson says he negotiated Fenster’s release during a recent visit to Myanmar when he held face-to-face meetings with General Min Aung Hlaing, the military leader who ousted the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in February.
Also read: Myanmar court sentences US journalist Danny Fenster to 11 years in prison
Richardson has also served as governor of New Mexico and secretary of energy in the Clinton administration. He has a record of acting as a sort of freelance diplomat. He is best known for travelling to nations with which Washington has poor if any relations, like North Korea. Recently he has been involved in seeking freedom for US citizens detained in Venezuela, another country with which Washington has strained ties.
Richardson has a long history of involvement with Myanmar, starting in 1994 when as a member of US Congress he met Suu Kyi at her home, where she had been under house arrest since 1989 under a previous military government. He last visited Myanmar in 2018 to advise on the crisis involving the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after Myanmar’s military in 2017 launched a brutal crackdown.