BANGKOK (AFP): Prominent climate activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong has been released from prison in Vietnam, her husband told AFP on Saturday, a year after she was jailed for tax evasion.
Last September Hong was sentenced to three years in prison for dodging $275,000 in taxes related to her environmental campaign group CHANGE.
She was the fifth environmentalist jailed for tax evasion, in what activists see as a campaign to silence them.
"Yesterday they released her," her husband Hoang Vinh Nam, told AFP. "It was very sudden."
Nam said Hong was being held in a jail in Gia Lai, a mountainous province in Vietnam's Central Highlands.
"She took a bus home, it took her 12 hours to reach Ho Chi Minh City and I picked her up from the bus station at 5:00 am this morning (22:00 GMT Friday).
"It's just amazing. She's good, she's healthy and she's the same person she was when she went in (to prison)." - AFP
