"Massud Barzani, president of the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, has decided to pardon, cancel the sentence of and release journalist and doctor Adel Hussein to mark Eid Al-Adha (the Feast of the Sacrifice)," union general secretary Zirak Kamal told AFP.

On November 26 a court in Arbil, capital of the Kurdish region, sentenced Hussein to six months in prison after convicting him of having encouraged homosexuality in an article last year in Hawlati al-Kurdiyah, an independent newspaper in Sulaimaniyah, the region's second largest city.

The journalists' union criticised the decision and urged the Kurdish authorities to intervene.

Hussein hosts a number of medical programmes on local television stations and has written many articles on medical subjects in Kurdish publications.

Homosexuality is a crime in Iraq but a law recently passed in the Kurdish regional parliament says journalists cannot be jailed for what they write, though they can be convicted and fined if their stories are judged to have gone too far.