US citizen Lori Berenson has been freed from a jail in Peru after serving 15 years of a 20-year sentence for working with leftist insurgents.
Ms Berenson, who turns 41 this week, was granted parole on Friday for the second time. She was first freed in May but sent back to jail in August when judges ruled her release was flawed because police failed to confirm where she would live while on parole in Lima.
Berenson, a New York native, returned to her apartment in the wealthy Miraflores district of Lima yesterday afternoon.
She declined to speak to the media.
In a rare public statement, Berenson apologised in August for working with a Marxist guerrilla movement.
"Yes, I collaborated with the MRTA. I was never a leader or a militant. I never participated in violent or bloody acts. I never killed anybody," she said at the time.
Berenson, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming involved in social justice issues in Latin America, was arrested on a bus in Peru in 1995 and charged with belonging to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, an urban guerrilla group.
Her legal dramas might not end soon. On Friday, Peruvian Justice Minister Rosario Fernandez harshly criticised the latest court decision granting Berenson parole and government lawyers have said they will appeal.
President Alan Garcia has indicated he would like to send Berenson home to the United States but that would require commuting her sentence in a case rife with controversy.
The issue of her release is divisive in Peru, still traumatised by a conflict that killed some 70,000 people.
The MRTA was active in the 1980s and 1990s when a larger armed insurgency, the Maoist Shining Path, was also fighting to overthrow the Peruvian government.
Reuters