Washington: China has released from jail David Lin, an American pastor, who had been sentenced to a life term in 2006.

"We welcome David Lin's release from prison in the People's Republic of China. He has returned to the United States and now gets to see his family for the first time in nearly 20 years," said a State Department spokesperson as cited by Al Jazeera.

Washington designated him wrongfully detained and had been urging Beijing to free him for years.

Politico reported that Lin's daughter confirmed to the outlet that the State Department had notified her that Chinese authorities had released her father from prison and that he would be touching down in San Antonio, Texas on Sunday. "No words can express the joy we have -- we have a lot of time to make up for," she told Politico.

Lin's release comes just weeks after National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi in Beijing.

Meanwhile, US Representative Chris Smith and Senator Jeff Merkley, the Chair and Co-chair respectively of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), are set to hold a hearing on securing the freedom of unjustly detained Americans in China on September 18.

The CECC Chairs had urged US President Joe Biden to raise the three cases among others with Xi Jinping during the November 2023 APEC Summit in San Francisco.

Born in Taiwan, Lin studied chemical engineering and came to the United States while working for a Taiwanese chemical company. He settled in Southern California and started his own firm supplying latex gloves for hospitals as per a report in the Washington Post.

Chinese authorities first questioned him in 2006 and barred him from leaving China. He was detained on August 17, 2007, and subsequently charged with fraud, the US news outlet stated. Lin pleaded not guilty but was convicted and sentenced in December 2009 to life imprisonment.

Lin, is one of the three American citizens, the other two being- Mark Swidan and Kai Li - that the State Department considered to be unjustly jailed in China.

Earlier in August this year, three Americans- Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva who were detained by Russia returned to the US.

The three were among 24 detainees released following a complex, multi-country effort to coordinate a prisoner swap between Russia and other Western nations that spanned years and marked the largest such exchange since the Cold War, CNN reported.

This report is auto-generated from a syndicated feed