VATICAN CITY
Daily Mail
By Associated Press and Dave Burke For Mailonline
A senior Vatican official has been granted forgiveness by the Pope and freed from jail after he was convicted of leaking secrets to journalists.
Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda was given ‘conditional freedom’ by Pope Francis, having served half of an 18-month sentence handed out by a Vatican court.
He was convicted of passing confidential documents to journalists, and has been sacked from his job as a high-ranking finance official.
In July, a Vatican court convicted Vallejo of conspiring to pass documents on to two journalists, Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi, although it cleared him and a co-defendant of forming a criminal organisation to do so.
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