German journalist Eva Maria Michelmann, who disappeared in Syria in January and was later confirmed to have been detained there, has returned to Germany, her lawyer told AFP on Friday. <\/p>\n
“It can be confirmed that Eva M. Michelmann was released this morning and returned to Germany this afternoon,” Roland Meister said, News.Az<\/a> reports, citing The New Arab.<\/a><\/p>\n Michelmann was able to leave Syria<\/a> via a third country and, from there, board a flight to Germany, according to a report in\u00a0Der Spiegel\u00a0magazine.<\/p>\n The journalist initially went missing during an offensive by\u00a0Syrian government fighters\u00a0in the northeast of Syria, which Kurdish forces had previously controlled.<\/p>\n Reports at the time said she had been taken in a vehicle belonging to government troops in the city of Raqqa, along with Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmed Polad.<\/p>\n According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), they both worked for the Istanbul-based socialist\u00a0Etkin News Agency\u00a0(ETHA) and the\u00a0Ozgur\u00a0TV channel.<\/p>\n The German foreign ministry said last week that it was making “intensive representations” in the case at a “high level” and had been able to visit Michelmann in detention.<\/p>\n However, the ministry did not say why Michelmann was being detained or whether Syrian authorities had charged her with any crime.<\/p>\n Meister told\u00a0AFP\u00a0last week that he had received reports of Michelmann being “tortured and subjected to constant interrogation, including at night” and that she had “lost a lot of weight”.<\/p>\n The CPJ had condemned “the Syrian government’s lack of transparency regarding the detention and whereabouts” of the two journalists as “unacceptable”.<\/p>\n