Alan Johnston: In his own words

On his first night in captivity: "The leader of the gang appeared in the doorway at about two in the morning, at quite a frightening moment. He was wrapped in a red and white chequered headscarf, his face concealed behind it.

"I knew then it was a jihadi group and the group I had been scared of in Gaza - there had been a lot of kidnappings, but there was one group I knew was dangerous.

"It was clearly a jihadi kidnapping, but he did say at the beginning I wouldn't be killed or tortured, but you don't know whether to believe a man whose face you can't see in those circumstances.

"A couple of hours later, around three in morning, they woke me up, put a hood over me, they handcuffed me and took me outside and of course you wonder then what may be coming.

"There was a time when another group said that I had been executed and I did wonder then if events might bear that out in the hours after that announcement was made.

"There were times down the track when they said they were thinking about killing me, but as time went on, I stopped believing that they would, but you could never rule it out for sure."

On his kidnappers: "They were often rude and unpleasant. They did threaten my life a number of times. There was one 24 hour period when they seemed to get very angry and chained me up but that only lasted 24 hours.

"It was like being buried alive and removed from the world, in the hands of people who were dangerous and unpredictable."

On his immediate plans: "Just the simplest thing, walking through any door, going down the street, seeing friends or family, people you love, you want to do it all at one go.

"You want to read books again, you want to sit in the sun and eat and speak I guess, that is the kind of thing you want to do."

On staying positive: "I'm sure every prisoner held unjustly around the world just hopes that he can keep going and hopes that his luck's going to change and somehow, some way, things are going to get better.

"But you have been lying there for three months and you wonder why you shouldn't still be lying there in nine months or 18 months or two years' time. That's the fear that really gnaws at you and that's what you've got to fight.

"You've got to keep the waves of depression and anxiety and fear at a minimum and try to look for anything faintly positive in your situation - for example, that they haven't killed you, they aren't torturing you and the food isn't making you ill. It's not much to work on, but you can't let yourself go under."

On Gaza: "I think three years of Gaza as a correspondent followed by four months of kidnap in Gaza is probably more Gaza than most people need in their lives and I do not think I will be going back for some time."

On his guards: "Mostly, I was under the guard of one man, a strange guy who barely spoke to me for days and would just glare at me and fly into rages at tiny things - a door slamming or whatever - and then at other times, once a fortnight, he would come across completely different and friendly, especially if he thought it might be coming to an end, the whole kidnapping.

"He would invite me through and we would watch television in his room, almost as if we were friends - of course we weren't.

"There was no violence at all towards me doing it, but then last night there was a terrible, highly-charged ride into the centre of Gaza as the kidnappers took me through road-blocks manned by Hamas men who were clearing the way for them.

"Obviously it was tense, but he was just beside himself with anger and he had a go at me and slapped me in the face and so did his mate, the other guard.

"It was a grim, grim ending to it, but he was a dark figure, who I didn't in any way get to know and couldn't quite fathom, a shifty man with angry moods."

On having access to radios: Johnston said his "lucky break" during his captivity was getting hold of two radios: "I began to realise the extraordinary extent of support that there was," he said.

"I realised the BBC from the top to the listeners in all corners of the world were coming out for me. You can imagine the extraordinary psychological boost that was.

"I was hearing friends and colleagues giving me messages from people I didn't know and I really did think that few kidnap victims anywhere in the world have ever been that lucky and I did say to myself 'If you can't get through this, getting that kind of extraordinary support, radio messages from friends and colleagues on a daily basis, it won't be very impressive'.

"It was a tremendous lift and I got that through the whole last three months of the kidnapping."

On being made to wear a bomb vest: "They realised that they might be under real pressure from Hamas.

"They were worried that their hideout might be stormed, and their way of pushing back in that situation was to release this video of me wearing a suicide bomber's belt and getting me to say that if there was to be any storming that obviously that would be detonated, I would be killed and so on.

"They perhaps wanted people to believe I was wearing it all the time. That wasn't at all the truth. I was only told to wear it for that video.

"That was the circumstances of the belt. I don't think it was actually armed at the time. I think there was some other element they needed to make it actually explode.

"I will never know happily whether they would have resorted to that very drastic idea if indeed the hideout had been stormed."

On his supporters: Mr Johnston said he wanted to thank everyone who signed the petition for his release, as well as the British Government, the BBC, Palestinian journalists who demonstrated in his support and Hamas.

"I am free, really, because of Hamas, I would say," he told Today.

On his state of mind: "I think I'm okay. It was an extraordinary level of stress and psychological pressure for a long, long time and obviously difficult to keep your mind in the right place in the right place, a constant battle.

"I feel as well as I can, I think."

On his family: He said his experiences had made him reconsider the stress he had caused his family by working in dangerous places.

"The hardest thing for me to deal with was thinking what my folks were going through," he said.

"They put up with me working in difficult places for a long time. I was so sorry that my activities had finally brought the very worst problems of the world pouring through their very quiet, peaceful lives there on the west coast of Scotland.

"I can't begin to say how sorry I am that at their age they had to go through this. It really, really made me think about needing to be more careful about what I make them worry about in future.

"It's going to be so good to see the hills of home again."

telegraph.co.uk

Good news that he has been released!