Zimbabwe's new deputy agriculture minister, Roy Bennett, was released from prison on bail on Thursday, nearly a month after the formation of the country's new unity government.

Bennett's release was ordered by a Supreme Court judge on Wednesday, after a long court battle in which prosecutors and police repeatedly blocked the implementation of orders by magistrates and judges to grant him bail. At one stage in the drawn-out court battle, police arrested a magistrate who ordered that he be freed.

Bennett, the national treasurer of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was // arrested and accused of insurgency, banditry, sabotage and terrorism when he returned from exile in South Africa on February 13 to take up his new ministerial post.

Announcing his release in the eastern city of Mutare, the MDC said thousands of supporters, who had spent all morning singing and dancing outside the prison, had welcomed Bennett when he emerged. The charges against him had been "trumped up," the MDC statement said.

There is a history of stormy relations between Bennett and leaders of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. In 2004 he served eight months in prison after starting a brawl with two cabinet ministers in Parliament. In a reference to the government's seizure of Bennett's farm in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa had called Bennett's forefathers "thieves and murderers."