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Last update - 23:21 03/08/2008
Palestinian official: Israel frees prominent jailed Hamas figure
By Reuters
Tags: hamas, gilad shalit 

Israel freed a former Hamas minister from prison on Sunday, an official from the Islamist group said.

The official said that Omar Abdel Razek, who was finance minister when Israel seized him in June 2006, had been freed by an Israeli judge.

"The judge believed it was enough, the period that he served in prison," Nasser al-Shaer, a former Hamas minister, told Reuters of Razek's release. "They have released him and he is on his way home."
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Israeli officials could not immediately confirm the release.

Some 40 Hamas officials, including former lawmakers, remain in Israel custody.

Razek was one of half a dozen Hamas lawmakers and ministers arrested around the same time on suspicion of membership of a terrorist organisation, which is how Israel categorizes Hamas, a group that rejects Israel's existence.

Those arrests came after gunmen captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid from Gaza in June 2006.

Meanwhile, Israel's cabinet voted earlier on Sunday to free five Palestinians in jail for minor offenses as part of a swap deal with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

This would be the final stage in the swap, which began with Israel releasing five Lebanese prisoners and nearly 200 bodies of enemy dead in return for the bodies of Israel Defense Forces reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who were abducted and killed in a July 2006 raid.

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