Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold

A US deep-sea treasure hunter who refused to disclose the location of a famed shipwreck's gold coins has been released from prison after a decade, with 500 coins still unaccounted for.

Tommy Thompson, 73, discovered millions of dollars' worth of sunken treasure from the 1857 wreck of the SS Central America, also known as the Ship of Gold, off the coast of South Carolina in 1988.

Investors in Thompson's venture accused him of cheating them out of promised proceeds and after years on the run he was jailed in 2015 on a criminal contempt charge.

When it sank in 1857, the ship had been carrying 30,000 pounds of gold newly minted in San Francisco.

The ship's treasure, which had been en route to the east coast to create a reserve for banks, sank 7,000 feet to the bottom of the ocean, taking with it 425 passengers and crew, and contributing to the financial panic of 1857.

A total of 161 investors had given Thompson $12.7m (£9.4m) to find the ship on the understanding that they would see returns on their investment.

Thompson, then an oceanic engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and his crew brought up thousands of gold bars and coins in 1988, much of them later sold to a gold marketing group in 2000 for about $50m.

He had maintained that the coins were turned over to a trust in Belize and that the profits from the sale of the first batch of gold had mostly gone toward legal fees and bank loans, according to the BBC's US partner CBS News.

The investors sued Thompson in 2005, alleging they had not yet received any proceeds from the treasure's sale.

Later, a criminal complaint against Thompson said the gold bars and coins he recovered from the seafloor were worth up to $400m.

Thompson went missing in 2012 while facing demands he appear in court and, after years on the run, he and an associate were arrested in 2015 in Boca Raton, Florida.

They had been staying in a hotel for two years, paying cash for their room under a false name and using taxis and public transport to avoid detection.

Thompson was held in contempt for refusing to answer questions about the location of about 500 missing gold coins, and he was sent to prison for 24 months in December 2015.

Civil contempt sentences are usually indefinite, lasting until the person complies with the court order - which in this case would be divulging the location of the missing coins.

But last year, the judge agreed to end Thompson's civil contempt sentence, arguing that he was unlikely to ever offer an answer, according to CBS News.