Lindsay Murdoch, Jakarta – The East Timorese militia leader Eurico Guterres has been freed 23 days after an Indonesian court jailed him for six months.

The former head of the feared Aitarak militia did not spend one day in jail after the sentence was imposed on him in April for inciting violence in Indonesian West Timor in September. He spent the 23 days under house arrest in a government housing complex in Jakarta. Even then, visitors often found he was not at home when they called.

He said yesterday that as a free man he had launched his career in Indonesian politics. He is chairman of an organisation called the Front of the Red and White Defenders, which last month threatened to raid bookshops in Jakarta and seize communist books and literature.

Speaking from the government house where he is still staying free of charge, Mr Guterres lashed out at foreigners in East Timor, saying they were ripping off the former Indonesian province's resources and would leave it one of the world's poorest states.

Indonesian prosecutors spent more than a year investigating crimes he allegedly committed before East Timor's independence ballot in 1999, but he has never been charged over them.

His release on May 23, which has not been made public in Jakarta, will anger East Timorese leaders who want the United Nations to set up an international tribunal to bring to justice those responsible for the East Timor bloodshed.

Influential politicians and commentators in Jakarta have described Mr Guterres as an Indonesian hero who should not have been charged with any offence. One supporter turned up at court to give him the deed to a block of land in West Java.

Since fleeing East Timor in September 1999 after his men rampaged through the capital, Dili, he has become a pop star, producing a hit condemning the UN's role in the territory's independence vote. He has assumed a leading role in the youth wing of Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle.

He had been asked to return to East Timor to help reconciliation efforts among East Timorese, he said. "The problem is ... the crisis of trust among the East Timor people towards each other. If people still insist that this person or that person must be punished there can be no reconciliation between them."