Ex-envoy wins release of jailed American reporter
BANGKOK — 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.
Fenster was handed over to former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson, who helped negotiate the release, and the two flew out of the Southeast Asian country together to Qatar.
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. “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 will return to the U.S. via Qatar over the next day and a half, according to the statement. He 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.
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. Recently he has been involved in seeking freedom for U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela.