The prisons authority in Nigeria on Wednesday granted freedom to 19 inmates awaiting trial and remanded in six Federal Prison formations in north central Kogi State, a senior judiciary official has confirmed to Xinhua.

Nasir Ajanah, the chief judge of Kogi State, said the inmates regained their freedom at the end of his two-week prison decongestion tour in the state. He also seized the opportunity to grant conditional bail to 12 other inmates across the states.

He said the unconditional release of the 19 inmates was not a grant of amnesty or pardon, noting some of the people in prisons were unjustly and unconstitutionally incarcerated for allegedly belonging to faceless gangs of thieves without concrete charges.

"The allegations were not in conformity with the provisions of the law," he said.

According to him, in Koton-Karfe Prison in the state, the warrants of 106 awaiting trial inmates were reviewed with 10 of them unconditionally released while one was granted bail.

He also granted bail to more inmates awaiting trial at the 200- capacity Medium Security Prison in Kabba area of the state and recommended psychiatric evaluation for two, whose mental condition had deteriorated while in detention.

He said most of the cases reviewed in Kabba prisons were very serious offenses like culpable homicide and armed robbery.

At Dekina Prison, he reviewed seven cases of awaiting trial inmates and granted bail to one, saying that their cases were very serious offenses.

Officers in charge of the prisons used the occasion to appeal to the authorities to come to their aid in the areas of logistics, especially operational vehicles and dilapidating infrastructures in some cases.