Ching Cheong, 58, a correspondent for the Straits Times in Singapore, was released from a prison in Guangdong Province just days before the Lunar New Year holiday. He had served almost two years of a five-year sentence.

Chinese officials had informed their counterparts in Hong Kong of the journalist's release, a Hong Kong government spokesman said.

Hong Kong's chief executive, Donald Tsang, welcomed Ching's release. "It is most gratifying that he could reunite with his family in time for the Spring Festival,"

Tsang said in a statement released by his office.

The deputy editor of the Straits Times, Warren Fernandez, said the newspaper was delighted that Ching was free, Bloomberg reported.

Ching was sentenced in August 2006 for selling state secrets to a Taiwan foundation that was a front for an espionage agency, the official Xinhua news agency reported at the time.

The penalty had been reduced because Ching had confessed to more espionage activities than those the state security departments had known about, Xinhua said.

Ching was detained in April 2005 during a visit to the city of Guangzhou and held in custody for 16 months before his one-day trial in a closed Beijing court.

Soon after his arrest, China's Foreign Ministry announced that he had confessed to spying.

Ching's wife, Mary Lau, said her husband had been detained after he traveled to the mainland to obtain recordings of secret interviews with the late Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang, who was ousted from his post and placed under house arrest for siding with student protesters ahead of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching's conviction was widely condemned by other Hong Kong journalists, press freedom groups and other human rights organizations as another example of China's use of legal sanctions to censor free speech and control information.

The journalism advocacy group, Reporters Without Borders, said China is holding 35 journalists and 51 cyber dissidents.

The protests over Ching's arrest on what many of his colleagues in China's most freewheeling city viewed as a legitimate reporting trip to the mainland became a delicate issue for the Hong Kong government. Without expressing a view on the merits of his conviction or detailing what action it had taken on his behalf, the Hong Kong government signaled that it was supportive of Ching's efforts to overturn his sentence.

Human rights campaigners in Hong Kong also welcomed his release but said other journalists or academics were still at risk of arrest and imprisonment for conducting legitimate research on the mainland. And, his early release did not offset what had been a flawed conviction, they said.

                   Home