On the first night of his captivity, Alan Johnston’s kidnappers put a hood over his head, handcuffed him and took him outside. He feared that he was about to be murdered.

“You wonder at that point what’s going to happen,” the BBC journalist said yesterday, shortly after emerging in the middle of the night from an “appalling” 16-week ordeal at the hands of one of Gaza’s most brutal gangs.

“It was like being buried alive, removed from the world. It was occasionally terrifying,” Mr Johnston added, looking tired and thin but otherwise displaying remarkable composure and lucidity for a man whose fate had hung in the balance for so long.

“It’s hard to put into words how good it is to be free,” he smiled at a 6am press conference that had been hastily organized by his Hamas liberators. “I dreamt, literally dreamt, of being free again and always woke up in that room. It’s almost hard to believe that I’m not going to wake up in a minute in that room again.”

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

BACKGROUND

• Israel continues Gaza blitz as 310 dead

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

Related Links

• Hamas lets Johnston kidnappers escape intact

• Family's dignity stands out in Lochgoilhead

• Shining a Light

Mr Johnston had covered dozens of kidnappings as a journalist in the Gaza Strip, and had watched with nervousness the rise of small jihadist groups here. But he believes that his captors did not know who he was when they swerved in front of his car and grabbed him on his way home on March 12. “I felt they didn’t really know what they got. They were laughing and pulling things out of my pockets – money, watch, phones, passport – and they were saying ‘British, British’ and laughing. I just remember looking out the window and realising I was in serious trouble.”

At that time, Gaza City was a lawless battleground between Hamas fighters and their secular rivals from Fatah. During his captivity, Hamas seized control of the coastal strip and vowed to bring all lawless elements to heel. With his release, the Islamist movement trumpeted that victory.

Ismail Haniyah, the Hamas Prime Minister sacked by President Abbas, made full use of the occasion. He draped Mr Johnston in a sash in the colours of the Palestinian flag and awarded him medals and badges.

Mr Johnston accepted the various insignia with a smile of forbearance, before greeting a throng of Palestinian press colleagues, with whom he had worked for almost three years, with hugs and kisses on the cheek.

“The last 16 weeks were of course just the very worst of my life,” he said, wearing a blue suit jacket, jeans and denim shirt.

He spent much of the time in solitary confinement, wondering whether he would be killed or held for years. His captors were “often rude and unpleasant”, taunting him with threats to cut his throat or blow him up.

After Hamas secured his release about 3am, by pledging an amnesty for the Army of Islam, he was whisked off for a shower and shave before being presented to Mr Haniyah.

Unable to digest the food, he had twice fallen sick with stomach problems and an allergic reaction. He begged his captors to find him simple foods, like potatoes and eggs, and they complied. But still he worried that his ill health could be ignored by the men who on one occasion dressed him in a suicide bomber’s explosives belt and threatened to “slaughter him like a lamb”.

Although his abductors told him at the outset that they would not kill or torture him, they later taunted him with murder threats. He had no idea whether they would carry out those threats, but said that there was almost no violence until the last half hour of his captivity. Then his panicked kidnappers hit him about the head as they bundled him in a car and drove through tense Hamas checkpoints as they prepared to surrender him.

At one point, when it appeared that negotiations with Hamas were going badly, he was chained by the wrists and ankles in a small room for 24 hours. When the Army of Islam feared that Hamas might attack, they forced him into the explosives belt. “It was the real thing,” he said, but thought that it had either not been fitted with Semtex or lacked a detonator.

One of the things that kept him going was a small radio he was given, on which he could listen to the BBC and hear the outpourings of support for him around the world. “Instinctively anybody in that situation knows there’s absolutely no sense in giving up hope. You’ve got to believe that somehow, some day, some way it’s going to end, that you’re not going to grow old there.”

But, as he followed the triumphant campaign of Hamas against Fatah last month, he realised that he might be approaching an endgame. “If Hamas were to storm the hideout, I didn’t know how they were going to react.

“I thought there was a chance that they really might kill me, that they wouldn’t let Hamas get what they had come for. You had to brace yourself for the worst.”

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game