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According to his entourage, a Niamey court on Monday overturned a nine-month prison sentence handed down to Abdoulaye Seydou, the chairman of a key activist group that supports the ruling military.
Niger’s presidential guard took power in a coup late last month.
Seydou, the leader of the M62 organization, had been imprisoned for seven months in connection with an army air raid on suspected jihadists in the country’s south.
“The Niamey Court of Appeal has cancelled the decision of the High Court… which had sentenced our comrade Abdoulaye Seydou to nine months in prison”, said M62 secretary general Sanoussi Mahaman.
“We have always said that Abdoulaye Seydou’s detention is an arbitrary decision… orchestrated from start to finish”.
The M62 movement, set up a year ago, is a coalition of around 10 groups and NGOs opposed to the presence of French military forces in Niger.
In recent weeks, it has led calls for rallies to support officers who on July 26 toppled the country’s elected president, Mohamed Bazoum.
Seydou was taken into custody in January and sentenced in April.
His group had accused the defence and security forces of massacring civilians in helicopter raids on an illegal gold mine last October, launched on the grounds that the alleged killers of two police officers had holed up there.
The government has acknowledged air strikes were carried out after two police were killed at Tamou, near the border with Burkina Faso.
It said seven people were killed and 24 wounded in the raids but the political opposition and civic groups say the death toll was much higher.
