Adnan Syed, the subject of the hit Serial podcast, has been freed from prison after a judge overturned his murder conviction from 2000. A judge in the city of Baltimore, Maryland has ordered Mr Syed's release and for a new trial to be scheduled after prosecutors said there were two other possible suspects in the killing of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee. The suspects were not disclosed to the defence at trial - a case which gained international attention when the podcast Serial, created in 2014, raised doubts about Mr Syed's guilt.
The wildly popular show delved deeper into the story of the teenagers' Baltimore community, families, school and friend groups with interviews with Mr Syed himself from behind bars. Episodes of the Serial Podcast have been downloaded more than 340 million times. The case has also spawned other works, including an HBO series in 2019. Mr Syed, now 42, has always said he was innocent and did not kill Hae Min Lee, who was 18 when she was strangled and buried in a Baltimore park in 1999.
Judge Melissa Phinn of the Circuit Court in Baltimore ordered him to be released from prison and put on home detention and that a new trial be scheduled within 30 days. The state's attorney for Baltimore filed a motion to vacate the conviction on Wednesday following a year-long investigation conducted alongside a public defender representing Mr Syed, in which several problems were found with witnesses and evidence from the trial.
Prosecutors told the court that they were not asserting that Mr Syed is innocent but that they no longer had confidence in "the integrity of the conviction," and that justice required that Mr Syed at least be afforded a new trial. Mr Syed was released from prison, where he has spent two decades, while prosecutors complete the investigation and decide whether to seek a new trial. Prosecutors said that they had found new information about two alternative suspects, whom they have not named.
