Summary Alyokhina and Nadezhda were granted amnesty after parliament approved a Kremlin-backed bill.
MOSCOW (AFP) - One of the jailed members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, was freed from prison on Monday after receiving amnesty, her lawyer and prison officials said.
"Today around 9 a.m. (0500 GMT) she walked out to freedom," said the spokeswoman of the prison service in Nizhny Novgorod Yelena Nikishova.
"I don t know what her further plans are," she told AFP.
Her lawyer Pyotr Zaikin told RIA Novosti that the 25-year-old was apparently headed to the train station in the city in a prison convoy.
Reporters waiting for Alyokhina by her colony number two in Nizhny Novgorod did not get a chance to speak with her after she was whisked away, her other lawyer told AFP.
"She is being driven away in a black car, which probably belongs to the head of the colony," said Irina Khrunova.
"They didn t hand her over to her lawyer, probably to avoid a media frenzy," she said.
Alyokhina and bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, whose two-year sentences for hooliganism in a Moscow church would have run out in early March, were granted amnesty last week after parliament approved a Kremlin-backed bill.
The two women were convicted and jailed on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after staging a "punk prayer" in Moscow s largest cathedral in Februrary 2012, ahead of Vladimir Putin s reelection, to protest the Orthodox Church s support of the strongman during the campaign.
Their jailing turned them from almost unknown rebel punks on the fringes of Russian society to the stars of a global cause celebre symbolising the repression of civil dissent under Putin
