The mother of jailed French journalist Christophe Gleizes wrote a letter to Algeria's president requesting he pardon her son from his seven-year sentence on terror-related charges.
Gleizes, a sportswriter, was convicted of "glorifying terrorism" in June.
"I respectfully ask you to consider granting Christophe a pardon, so that he may regain his freedom and his family," Sylvie Godard wrote in the letter, which was dated December 10 and seen by AFP on Monday.
Gleizes's lawyers are also seeking a new trial with the country's highest court.
Algerian court upholds 7-year sentence for French journalist Christophe Gleizes
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© France 24
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Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 while travelling to northeastern Algeria's Kabylia region to write about the country's most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he met the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organisation by Algiers.
At this month's appeal hearing, Gleizes said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organisation, and asked the court's forgiveness for his "journalistic mistakes".
An Algerian appeals court upheld his sentence this month, a decision his mother called "incomprehensible".
"Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people," she wrote in her letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
Gleizes is currently France's only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work towards his release.
Gleizes's jailing comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers after France last year officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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