ABUJA, May 16 (Reuters) - Nigeria has granted an amnesty to all prisoners over 70 and to those over 60 who have been on death row for 10 years or more, and will free them before the inauguration of the new president on May 29.

Information Minister Frank Nweke said the cabinet approved the measure on Wednesday as part of efforts to reduce crowding in Nigerian prisons, where the majority of inmates have never been convicted of any crime.

"Council today approved the release of all prisoners who have attained the age of 70 years and above, and those who are sentenced to death but are still waiting for the hangman in the past 10 years and have attained the age of 60 years and above," Nweke told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

He did not give the number of inmates in each category who would be freed.

There are an estimated 700 prisoners on death row in Nigeria but the rate of executions is very slow so most spend years, sometimes decades, awaiting their sentence. Eight executions were recorded in the past five years.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak, who visited Nigerian prisons in March, said he had interviewed several inmates who had been on death row so long that it amounted to psychological torture.

Nowak cited the case of one man in overcrowded Port Harcourt prison who has been waiting for 23 years to be put to death.

Justice Minister Bayo Ojo has said in the past that more than 25,000 inmates, or 65 percent of Nigeria's total prison population, have never been convicted of any crime.

They remain in prison because of delays in the justice system, missing police files, absent witnesses and prison mismanagement. It is common for prisoners to wait five to 10 years for their trials, and thousands have spent longer in jail than they would have served if convicted.

Ojo said last year that 10,000 prisoners awaiting trial had been cleared for release under a prison decongestion programme, but there has been no official announcement on how many have actually been freed.

President Olusegun Obasanjo is due to hand over power to Umaru Yar'Adua on May 29.

It is the first handover from one elected civilian president to another in Nigeria, but the April elections that gave Yar'Adua his mandate were so marred by vote-rigging that European observers said they were "not credible".

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