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2010-09-08 09:53:43
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press
Writer Tue Sep 7, 10:45 pm ET
TOKYO A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan for five months
managed to send out a message via Twitter that he was alive when his captors
asked him how to use a cell phone.
Just days before he was freed, Kosuke Tsuneoka said one of the militants
brought him his new cell phone and asked the prisoner to set it up.
The younger militants were more interested in accessing Al-Jazeera on the
phone, but Tsuneoka shifted their attention to Twitter, successfully getting
them to ask him to demonstrate how it worked. He then sent the two following
tweets: "i am still allive, but in jail" and "here is archi in kunduz. in the
jail of commander lativ."
"That's how I got the message out," Tsuneoka told a news conference in Tokyo on
Tuesday, a day after he arrived safely back in Japan. "I'm sure they never
thought they were tricked."
A couple of days later, the militants whom Tsuneoka said identified
themselves as members of Hizb-e-Islami but posed as Taliban to the Japanese
government set him free in part because he is a Muslim. He had converted to
Islam in 2000.
The Japanese government said it paid no ransom to free Tsuneoka. He said he
believes that because the captors didn't seem to be overjoyed at the time of
his release or suggest they had received any cash.
During his five-month captivity in northern provinces of Kunduz and Takhar, the
freelance journalist thought he would never get out alive.
"I thought I would be certainly killed, so I tried to prepare myself to face
it," he recalled. His fear reached its peak in late June, when the captors
issued an ultimatum to the Japanese government, threatening to kill him if
their demands were not met within 72 hours.
When the time passed, and there was no sign they were going to kill him, he
started to think he could survive and gain freedom at some point.
"Although it was frustrating that I didn't know when that might be, my fear of
death gradually faded and I felt better," he said.
Tsuneoka said after that, anger rather than fear helped him survive the ordeal.
Even though his captors fed him well and never used violence, he repeatedly
thought about how he could retaliate against them.
"They are a bunch of thieves just trying to extort money from Japan," he said.
The rest was boredom. He had nothing to do but sleep, gaze out the window to
see birds or count ants crawling on the dirt floor, when the young militants
were not around to talk.
Tsuneoka was kidnapped in April, when he traveled to a Taliban-controlled area
in northern Afghanistan, and was released Saturday night to a Japanese Embassy.
Tsuneoka had been abducted before. He disappeared in Georgia in 2001 and was
held for several months by unidentified individuals, according to the Committee
to Protect Journalists. He was freed during a Georgian military operation.
Tsuneoka is the latest of more than half a dozen foreign journalists kidnapped
in Afghanistan, including two French reporters who were seized last December in
Kapisa province just outside Kabul.
Despite what he had gone through, Tsuneoka doesn't mind returning to
Afghanistan.
"I'm ready to go back right now," he said. "But after all the trouble, I have
to think how not to repeat the same mistake. That's the problem."