Bookmark Jamaica-Gleaner.com
Go-Jamaica Gleaner Classifieds Discover Jamaica Youth Link Jamaica
Business Directory Go Shopping inns of jamaica Local Communities

Home
Lead Stories
News
Business
Sport
Commentary
Letters
Entertainment
What's Cooking
International
The Star
E-Financial Gleaner
Overseas News
The Voice
Communities
Hospitality Jamaica
Google
Web
Jamaica- gleaner.com

Archives
1998 - Now (HTML)
1834 - Now (PDF)
Services
Find a Jamaican
Careers
Library
Live Radio
Weather
Subscriptions
News by E-mail
Newsletter
Print Subscriptions
Interactive
Chat
Dating & Love
Free Email
Guestbook
ScreenSavers
Submit a Letter
WebCam
Weekly Poll
About Us
Advertising
Gleaner Company
Contact Us
Other News
Stabroek News

MIDDLE EAST - Alan Johnston recounts months in captivity
published: Thursday | July 5, 2007


BBC journalist Alan Johnston gestures upon his arrival at a news conference in Jerusalem yesterday. Johnston, who was held hostage in the Gaza Strip, was freed yesterday after a deal between the ruling Hamas Islamists and the al-Qaida-inspired clan group that kidnapped him in March. - Reuters

JERUSALEM (AP):

Kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen in Gaza for nearly four months, reporter Alan Johnston had only one link to the world - a radio that picked up British Broadcasting Corp. programmes reporting frantic efforts to free him.

Confined to a dark room by his captors, Johnston told the BBC after his release yesterday that he was often unsure if he "was going to live or die."

He said he reacted emotionally when he heard during his captivity that technicians at the Glastonbury rock festival in Britain put down their tools to express solidarity with him and that actors on the popular British soap opera Eastenders took a two-minute break to demand that he be freed.

"I'm so immensely grateful for that, and I will be all my life," Johnston said in Jerusalem, addressing a BBC rally in London celebrating his release.

Kidnapped

Johnston, a native of Scotland who reported from Gaza for the BBC for three years, was snatched from a Gaza City street by masked gunmen on March 12, shoved into a car and spirited away.

Johnston was the latest in a string of foreigners kidnapped in Gaza, though his time in captivity was by far the longest and he said he had often envisioned being kidnapped himself.

"It was a vaguely surreal ex-perience, as if I'd lived it before, because I'd imagined it so many times, and there I was, before I knew it, on my back in the back seat with a hood over my head," Johnston said at a press conference at Britain's Jerusalem consulate, where reporters greeted him with applause.

More International



Print this Page

Letters to the Editor

Most Popular Stories





© Copyright 1997-2007 Gleaner Company Ltd.
Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Letters to the Editor | Suggestions | Add our RSS feed
Home - Jamaica Gleaner