Pardon for 500 Togolese prisoners

Gnassingbe Eyadema is Africa's longest serving president

Togo's government has freed some 500 prisoners, after President Gnassingbe Eyadema granted them a pardon.

Among those released are seven militants of the opposition Union of Forces for Change (UFC) party.

The European Union (EU) has made improvement to human rights and political freedoms conditions to the resumption of aid frozen in 1993.

Togo signed an accord with the EU in April committing itself to improving its human rights record.

Molotov cocktails

According to the BBC's Ebow Godwin in Lome, some of the freed prisoners have been held in preventive detention for long periods while their cases were pending before the courts.

The release of the UFC prisoners has proved controversial, our correspondent says, because they claim they were political detainees.

They were jailed for making home-made Molotov cocktail bombs and vandalising a petrol station in the capital, Lome in protest at the disqualification of UFC leader Gilchrist Olympio from last year's presidential elections.

But Agano Koffi, a released UFC youth leader, said that there will be no need for him to manufacture home-made bombs again because the political situation in Togo appears to have changed for the better.

On the release of the prisoners, State Prosecutor Dabre Gbandjagba said none of them had been held for political reasons.

"As far as we are concerned those released today are common law offenders, not political prisoners," he told reporters on Tuesday.

President Eyadema seized power in a coup in 1967 and is Africa's longest serving leader.

In all 174 prisoner were freed from Lome civil prisons, 82 from Kara in the north of the country and 62 from Aneho in the south.