Topless protesters leave Tunisian prison

Three European women with the radical protest group Femen were freed from a Tunisian jail Wednesday after receiving suspended sentences for baring their breasts in public. The three activists left the women's prison in Manouba, northeast Tunisia, in a police van just before 2200 GMT taking them to the interior ministry for the final formalities for their release, according to an AFP journalist at the scene. Their lawyer, Souhaib Bahri, said the three women, who had been detained for a month, would fly back to Europe on Thursday morning. Earlier Wednesday the three militant feminists, two French and one German, received suspended sentences of four months and one day. "It is a great joy to have spoken for the freedom of Femen in Tunisia and to have been heard," the defendants' two French lawyers Patrick Klugman and Ivan Terel told AFP. The three were arrested outside the main courthouse in Tunis on May 29 during their topless protest in support of Amina Sboui, a detained Tunisian activist with the same "sextremist" group. They were jailed on June 12, originally with custodial sentences, for indecency and an attack on public morals, sentences criticised as harsh by international rights groups and European countries. Source: AFP