After spending more than 400 days in prison, an Australian journalist working for the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera was freed and deported from Egypt on Sunday, Egyptian state media reported.
The 48-year-old correspondent, Peter Greste, left Cairo on a flight to Cyprus and was expected to travel onward to Australia, Egyptian officials said. Al Jazeera confirmed in a statement that he was on his way home.
The case of Greste and two colleagues drew intense scrutiny from rights groups and media advocacy organizations in the wake of their arrest on terrorism-related charges in December 2013.
Coming amid a wide-ranging crackdown by Egyptian authorities that has imperiled many basic liberties and resulted in the jailing of more than 40,000 people, the erratic court proceedings against the journalists were widely viewed as an embarrassment to Egypt and an assault on media freedom.
The three strongly denied any wrongdoing, and supporters described the case as highly politicized, driven by the rift between Qatar and Egypt's authoritarian President Abdel Fattah Sisi over the wealthy emirate's support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Greste's release reportedly came on Sisi's orders.
Sisi led the popularly supported 2013 coup against the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president. Morsi is imprisoned and facing a variety of charges, some of them capital crimes.
The status of the two other Al Jazeera English journalists imprisoned along with Greste -- one an Egyptian-Canadian, the other Egyptian -- was not immediately clear. The journalists had been given sentences ranging from seven to 10 years in prison, but a retrial was ordered late last year upon appeal, raising hopes they would soon be freed.
Twitter: @laurakingLAT
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times7:13 a.m.: This article has been updated with Greste's departure from Cairo.
This article was originally published at 6:58 a.m.
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