Summary Balendran Jeyakumari was released Tuesday on condition that she doesn't leave the country.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - A Sri Lankan court has released on bail a woman who rights groups say was arrested a year ago for demanding information about people who went missing during the country s decades-long civil war.
Balendran Jeyakumari was released Tuesday on condition that she doesn t leave the country, according to her attorney, K.S. Ratnavale.
The release is seen as a good-will gesture by Sri Lanka s new government toward the country s estranged ethnic Tamil minority.
Jeyakumari was arrested last March in the country s former northern war zone, with the government alleging that she had sheltered a man trying to revive the Tamil Tiger rebel group. Government troops defeated the rebels in 2009 to end the civil war.
Human rights groups, however, said the arrest was an attempt by the then-administration to silence activists.
