Teng Biao was arrested in February during crackdown intended to prevent dissent inspired by Middle East uprisings
China has released a human rights lawyer who was detained more than two months ago in a security crackdown aimed at preventing Middle East-inspired unrest breaking out in the country.
Teng Biao returned home on Friday afternoon but was not able to speak to the media, his wife, Wang Ling, said. She declined to comment on his physical or mental well-being.
Other lawyers and activists released after similar detentions have also declined to speak to the media, possibly as a condition of their release.
China Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong rights advocacy group, said earlier Teng disappeared on 19 February and officers searched his home, seizing two computers, a printer, articles, books, DVDs and photos of another rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng.
Teng, a law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, was among dozens of lawyers and activists across China who have vanished, been interrogated or detained for subversion as the Chinese government, apparently unnerved by events in the Middle East and North Africa, moved to prevent dissent.
Meanwhile, an expert on China's role in the Korean war, who was jailed for more than a decade for spying, will be released in June after his sentence was reduced further, a human rights group said.
The intermediate court in Guangzhou cut the sentence of scholar Xu Zerong by a third, slicing five more months from his 13-year term, said the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco.
Xu's detention, in 2000, came as Chinese security forces began turning their attention to what they considered to be spying networks involving Chinese academics with foreign ties.
Xu, a Hong Kong native who also goes by the name David Tsui, had copied books and documents on the Korean war he thought were declassified and gave them to a South Korean scholar, the foundation said. He was arrested for providing intelligence to foreigners. During the investigation, an office in the Guangzhou military region said the materials Xu copied were still classified as secret.