WASHINGTON — Jeffrey E. Fowle, one of three Americans imprisoned by North Korea, has been released and is on his way home after nearly six months in captivity, the White House said Tuesday, easing but not ending the acute tensions with the hermetic Asian country that still considers the United States a bitter enemy.

A State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, who announced Mr. Fowle’s release in Washington, said American officials were still trying to secure the release of the other two prisoners, Matthew Todd Miller and Kenneth Bae.

Mr. Fowle, 56, an Ohio municipal worker, entered North Korea on a tourist visa in April and was arrested after he left a Bible in a hotel. Experts on North Korea have said that he may have been suspected of proselytizing his Christian faith, which is interpreted as a crime in a country that sees religion as a threat to the authoritarian government.

In interviews with American news organizations permitted by North Korea in September, Mr. Fowle said that he had been allowed to contact his wife and three small children in Miamisburg, Ohio, outside Dayton, but that he had not spoken with them at that point for three weeks. “I’m desperate to get back to them,” he told the interviewers.