Kidnapped

And Other Dispatches

Alan Johnston

ISBN 13 978 1 84668 142 4

November 2007

Price £7.99

Paperback, 160 pp.

Subjects: Current Affairs, Memoir

When Alan Johnston, the last western journalist who dared to remain in Gaza, was kidnapped by religious terrorists - millions of people, from the backstreets of Gaza to London, New York and Johannesburg, felt the need to express their anger and their determination to see him free. The captivity of Alan Johnston was a historical attack on the freedom of speech – and this collection of his dispatches is the long awaited and moving account of life in Gaza, his ordeal and his release.

He talks of the room in which he was held, how he was stripped of his watch and could only tell the time by the passage of the sun and the five calls to prayer from mosques. His captors allowed him to see his parents’ television appeal and he tells of the relief to see his father’s ‘powerful and dignified’ address. He evokes the psychological battle to keep control of his mind in these extreme conditions and his deeper sense of the value of freedom…