A one-time press aide to Mayor Giuliani was released Monday from a Guyanese jail, where he had been held for five years on capital charges of treason.

“I am out,” Mark Benschop, 36, said in a telephone interview from Guyana yesterday afternoon, 19 hours after his release.

A Guyanese national, Mr. Benschop had been incarcerated there since 2002, when he attended a demonstration in the capital city, Georgetown, that turned into a riot and that the government describes as an assault on the presidential complex. It resulted in the police fatally shooting two people. Mr. Benschop, a TV talk show host at the time, has said he was covering the event as a journalist. At a trial in 2004, which ended in deadlock, the government claimed Mr. Benschop was using a bullhorn to urge protesters to storm the government building, according to a news report of the trial.

Mr. Benschop was released after the South American country’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo, pardoned him on Monday.

“I maintain my innocence of the charges against me,” Mr. Benschop said. “I would have preferred my freedom to have come from the courts.”

Born in Guyana, Mr. Benschop grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He describes himself as aligned with the Republican Party. In 1994, Mr. Benschop, then a young reporter who had interviewed Mr. Giuliani before, went to work for the new mayor as a press assistant. Leaving the mayor’s office after 11 months, he founded a newspaper published in the city, the Guyana Observer, and worked in radio here.

He returned to Guyana in 2000, where he had an evening show called “Straight Up” on a station allied with the ruling People’s Progressive Party. He later moved to a station aligned with the main opposition party, the People’s National Congress.

“There I lashed out at the government for corruption and money laundering,” he said. His criticism led to repeat arrests and the detention of his wife, he said.

A Brooklyn organization, the Caribbean Institute for Democracy, had recently filed a petition on his behalf before Washington’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The commission has yet to take up his case.

The president of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy, Rickford Burke, said he wrote to Mr. Giuliani about Mr. Benschop’s jailing but never received a response. A spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani, Sunny Mindel, said she did not have any details about Mr. Benschop’s employment under Mr. Giuliani.

Speaking of what his future in Guyana held after his release, Mr. Benschop said: “I do have a lot of options. People are asking me to run for mayor of Georgetown. People are asking me to form my own political party. I have always been remembered.”

But he added that “he wouldn’t turn down” an opportunity to return to New York, in order to resume publishing his newspaper.