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Freed journalist speaks out


Released BBC reporter Alan Johnston speaks to the media Wednesday at the British consulate in Jerusalem.Associated Press
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Ken Ellingwood Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM – For nearly four months in solitary confinement, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston felt “buried alive” but buoyed by international support he knew was out there by listening to his network’s radio broadcasts.

In his first lengthy remarks after being freed by Palestinian kidnappers in the Gaza Strip, Johnston said Wednesday that coverage of vigils and expressions of worldwide encouragement helped him fight despair and stay focused as days of captivity turned into weeks and months.

“It’s a battle to keep your mind in the right place,” 45-year-old Johnston said during a news conference at the British Consulate in Jerusalem. He spoke some 14 hours after being released by his captors, who handed him to officials of the militant Hamas movement, which had declared after capturing sole control of Gaza last month that freeing him was a top priority.

The kidnappers, members of a heavily armed clan calling itself the Army of Islam, freed him after hundreds of Hamas gunmen surrounded the compound.

Pale and squinting in the afternoon sunshine, Johnston sported a fresh haircut and was occasionally philosophical as he described moments of terror and weeks of grinding dread.

Johnston said he was stopped by gunmen March 12 while driving home on a quiet street, a trip he said he had made “1,000 times” during his three years in Gaza. The kidnappers handcuffed the Scot and threw a hood over his head as they riffled his wallet, plump from a recent trip to the bank, and took his watch.

He was familiar with Gaza kidnappings ending after a few hours.

“I was wondering, is this one of the more benign Gaza kidnaps?” Johnston recalled. “What I was worried about all the time was that it was a jihadi group.”

His fears were apparently confirmed when he met the lead kidnapper and concluded from the garb and rhetoric that his captors were Islamic extremists.

“They described me as a prisoner in the war between Muslims and non-Muslims,” Johnston said. “He was a guy who saw any Westerner as worthy of punishment.”

Johnston said it was his only face-to-face meeting with the leader, whom he did not identify.

The journalist said he was moved twice. He spent most of his captivity in the company of the same guard, a man in his 20s whom Johnston described as moody but not violent. Johnston was kept in a room but allowed to use an adjacent kitchen to prepare simple meals.

Johnston said the kidnappers appeared relaxed until Hamas routed the rival Fatah movement’s forces during a week of brutal street fighting last month.

“Suddenly they were worried that Hamas had them in their sights,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that if Hamas hadn’t come in and turned the heat on in a big way, I’d still be in that room.”

For Hamas, which has vowed to bring order to the violence-plagued strip, Johnston’s release marked an opportunity to win credibility in the face of international efforts to isolate the movement in Gaza. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, fired the Hamas-led government following the fighting, leaving Gaza to Hamas and the West Bank in Fatah’s hands.

Johnston said his confinement was a “special journalistic hell” because he was unable to cover the tumultuous events that suddenly left Hamas in sole control of what is effectively a Gaza ministate.

“I devoted three years of my life to covering that place and the biggest story that happens when I’m there – I’m lying in a cell,” Johnston said.