Kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston said he was in good health and being treated well in a video released on Friday, the first since militants abducted him in the Palestinian enclave over 11 weeks ago.
It was the clearest evidence he was alive following his March 12 abduction. It was not clear when the video, in which the British reporter criticised London’s policy towards the Muslim world, was taped.
”My captors have treated me very well,” he said on the video posted on an Islamist website by a group called the Army of Islam, which said last month it had kidnapped him.
”They have fed me well. There has been no violence towards me at all and I’m in good health,” said Johnston, wearing a baggy red sweater and sitting before a dark grey background.
The group holding him repeated its demand on the video for Britain to free Muslim prisoners, particularly the Islamist cleric Abu Qatada. Johnston criticised the British military presence alongside the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Scotsman, who turned 45 in captivity last month, is the only Western correspondent based full time in the Gaza Strip, where a year-old economic embargo and fighting among militants have worsened living conditions for the 1,4-million people crammed into the territory and heightened instability.
None of several foreigners seized in Gaza has been harmed. None has been held so long, with most freed within days.
Saeb Erekat, a top adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called the video ”proof of life”, decried the kidnappers and urged the government led by the militant group Hamas to act.
”Who’s paying them [the kidnappers], who’s sponsoring them, they’re destroying the Palestinian cause, they’re harming us, they’re harming Islam, and I believe the government must act,” Erekat, from Hamas’s rival Fatah movement, told the BBC.
‘More negotiations’
Mohammad al-Madhoun, an aide to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, said the tape may show that Johnston was in good condition but was not a sign that a deal to secure his release was near — despite comments to that effect from another senior Hamas figure in Gaza a week ago.
”I expect more concentrated negotiations to come,” he said.
In London, a British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”We are urgently trying to check out the reports.”
Palestinian officials had often said they believed Johnston was safe and well, although an email in the name of another, unknown group had said in April that he had been killed.
The video, posted on a website often used by al-Qaeda, begins with a voice reciting a verse from the Qur’an calling for Muslims to fight foreign ”infidels”.
”In all this, you can see the British government is endlessly working to occupy Muslim lands against the will of the people in those places,” Johnston said in the video.
The tape was interrupted as he started addressing his family and a text appeared saying the BBC had refused to take Johnston’s message to his family, without elaborating.
It was again interrupted as Johnston was about to list the captors’ demands. What followed was part of an audio tape issued by the Army of Islam on May 9 demanding the release of Abu Qatada and other Muslims in Britain and other ”infidel” states.
Abu Qatada is described by the British government as a ”significant international terrorist” with suspected close links to al-Qaeda. He is detained but has not faced trial. — Reuters