Ivory Coast ex-first lady Simone Gbagbo freed after amnesty

Former Ivory Coast first lady Simone Gbagbo, who had been serving a 20-year jail term, was released today, two days after being amnestied by President Alassane Ouattara, her lawyer said.

Gbagbo left the gendarmerie academy in Abidjan where she had been held for seven years, said attorney Blede Dohore.

She arrived home in the upmarket district of Cocody, where hundreds of supporters greeted her.

Gbagbo, 69, the wife of former president Laurent Gbagbo, has spent seven years behind bars for her role in political violence that claimed several thousand lives in 2010-11.

She had been implicated in the 2011 shelling of a market in an Abidjan district that supported Ouattara and for belonging to a "crisis cell" that allegedly coordinated attacks by the armed forces and militias in support of her husband.

She was first detained without trial after her arrest in 2011 and later convicted and sentenced in 2015 on a charge of endangering state security.

Laurent Gbagbo has been in detention at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at
"To decide, after seven years of judicial proceedings involving hundreds of victims and alleged perpetrators, that only 60 people will face justice is not only an arbitrary decision but will be an act of disrespect to victims."