Polanski Free After US Sex Charges Questioning

Film director Roman Polanski has been allowed to walk free after being questioned by Polish prosecutors on a US arrest warrant for sex offences.

The maker of The Pianist and Chinatown has been sought by American police since 1978 after he fled the country before he could be sentenced for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

The US asked the Polish prosecutor general to hold the 81-year-old director until he could be extradited, Polish justice ministry spokesman Mateusz Martyniuk said.

But prosecutors in Krakow, southern Poland, released him after questioning.

"Prosecutors have decided it was not necessary to arrest Roman Polanski," said Boguslawa Marcinkowska, a spokesperson for Krakow district prosecutors.

Polanski had said he would co-operate with authorities.

Los Angeles police charged him with six felony counts, including rape and sodomy, in 1977 before he accepted a plea deal. But he absconded on the eve of sentencing the following year fearing that the judge planned to go back on the bargain.

Police said he got the girl to pose for photos in actor Jack Nicholson's Hollywood home after telling her mother, a model and actress, that they were for French Vogue.

The teenager told a grand jury that Polanski plied her with champagne and drugs, and then had sex with her.

In 2010, the Polish prosecutor general said Polanski could not be extradited because under Polish law too much time had passed since the offences.

But this is not the case in American law, and he can still be held at the US request.

The director will be able to return to France, where he is directing a stage show called the The Vampires' Ball.

Polanski was arrested in 2009 in Zurich when he travelled to Switzerland to pick up a prize at a film festival after the US made a similar request.

But he was eventually allowed to return to France after an extradition bid failed.

Last year his victim, Samantha Geimer, now 51, published her account of what happened, The Girl: A Life Lived In The Shadow Of Roman Polanski, saying it was time she took "back ownership of my own story".

Geimer said she harbours no hate for her attacker: "My family never asked that Polanski be punished. We just wanted the legal machine to stop."