Niger Releases RFI Reporter Held Over Rebel Links

The initial charges against Kaka were `complicity in plotting against state authority`, a crime which carried a possible life sentence.

A Niger appeals court freed a local reporter for Radio France International (RFI) on Tuesday after he had spent more than a year in jail accused of collaborating with Tuareg-led rebels.

The court ordered Moussa Kaka's release and downgraded the charges against him. He was arrested in September last year charged with colluding with rebels who have been waging a guerrilla war in Niger's uranium-producing north.

He will now face lesser charges of offences "against the integrity of national territory". No date was set for the new trial.

"I'm really emotional. I've come back from the gates of hell," Kaka told journalists after being freed.

He denies the charges against him, arguing that his contacts with the Tuareg-led rebel Niger Justice Movement (MNJ) were part of his professional work as a journalist.

The initial charges against Kaka were "complicity in plotting against state authority", a crime which carried a possible life sentence.

RFI and international press freedom watchdogs ran a high-profile campaign urging Niger to release Kaka.

"This good news is a first step which will, we hope, quickly lead to an honourable and just solution," Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement reacting to Kaka's release.

Before Tuesday's appeals court ruling, the charges against Kaka had been previously dismissed but he had remained in jail after appeals by the state prosecutor.

Niger's government, which dismisses the MNJ rebels as bandits and drug-traffickers, has slapped a strict ban on foreign journalists visiting the north, where sporadic battles and ambushes since early last year have killed at least 200 rebels and 70 government soldiers, according to the authorities.

Several foreign reporters have been arrested and deported for breaking the ban.

The MNJ has said it is fighting for more autonomy and a greater share of the northern region's mineral wealth for the Tuaregs and other nomadic peoples who live there.