BANGKOK: Myanmar’s military junta released Japanese documentary filmmaker Toru Kubota on Thursday after detaining him for more than three months in Yangon, its largest city.

Kubota appears to have departed the country from Yangon International Airport, and is expected to arrive in Japan on Friday.

He was detained on July 30 when filming a protest in Yangon against Myanmar’s military coup. He was given a prison sentence of 10 years in total and sent to the city’s Insein prison, where many political prisoners are held.

Myanmar’s military charged Kubota with violating the immigration control law, accusing him of engaging in news-gathering activities after entering the country on a tourist visa.

He was also charged with sedition for taking part in the protest and spreading alleged misinformation about the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

“The Myanmar side explained that the release was based on a strong request from the Japanese government,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said in Tokyo, noting that Kubota did not have any health issues.

Kubota was released as the Myanmar junta granted pardons to some 5,800 prisoners on Thursday, a holiday in the Southeast Asian country.

The military junta also released Sean Turnell, an Australian economic adviser to democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi who was given a prison term of three years for leaking state secrets, and Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador to Myanmar who was sentenced to one year in prison for violating the immigration control law.

ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, a group of politicians from Association of Southeast Asian Nations member states, said that Myanmar still has over 13,000 political prisoners behind bars.

The junta made “an apparent gesture of goodwill…in order to alleviate international pressure,” the group said in a statement. “No one should fall for this trick.”

JIJI Press