Student leader Min Ko Naing in Yangon on Saturday after his release. (AFP)

Yangon, Nov. 20 (Reuters): Myanmar?s ruling junta has freed its second most prominent political prisoner, leader of the 1988 student democracy protests Min Ko Naing, in a move analysts said could be a major step towards political reform.

?I feel as if I have awoken from dreamland and I?ve just started to open my eyes,? Min Ko Naing said at his Yangon home after being freed from almost 16 years in jail and flown back to the capital from Sittwe, 560 km to the west.

The release of Min Ko Naing, who had been in jail since March 1989, was one move Myanmar experts had been looking for as they sought to measure the significance of the purge of Prime Minister Khin Nyunt and his intelligence apparatus last month.

The other was the release from house arrest of democracy icon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

She remained under house arrest at her lakeside villa in Yangon despite the junta?s dramatic announcement it was freeing nearly 4,000 people held ?inappropriately? by Khin Nyunt?s now dismantled intelligence apparatus.

Members of her National League for Democracy were among those filtering back to their homes from jails around the country in the wake of the mass release, but there was no word on whether Suu Kyi?s deputy, Tin Oo, had also been freed from house arrest.

NLD spokesman U Lwin said the mass release generated hope Suu Kyi might be allowed to move out of the house, where she is without a telephone and needs military permission to see anyone.

NLD officials were reluctant to confirm the names of colleagues returning home, possibly because they did not want to trigger celebrations that could provoke the military which has ruled the former Burma in one form or another since 1962.

But contrary to initial expectations, Win Tin, a high-profile Suu Kyi aide jailed in 1989, was not among those freed on Friday. He was imprisoned a year before the NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990 only to be denied power by the generals.

That election came two years after the military quashed the student protests, killing hundreds, possibly thousands. Win Tin?s relatives quoted him as saying from jail on Saturday that there was no sign of his release.

Democracy activists celebrated Min Ko Naing?s freedom. ?Min Ko Naing is to the student movement in Burma what Aung Sang Suu Kyi is to the entire country,? said Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma, based in Bangkok.

?To see him released yesterday has been an amazing surprise for all of us,? she said. ?He had been kept in full solitary confinement for most of the past 15 years. So to see Min Ko Naing released is definitely a source of hope among human rights activists.?