‘Taliban’ prisoner Tweeted via captor’s mobile phone

A Japanese freelance journalist held prisoner for five months in Afghanistan has told how he used micro-blogging site Twitter to let the world know he was still alive. Kosuke Tsuneoka, who was released on Saturday, was speaking about his ordeal in Tokyo yesterday.

Tsuneoka (pictured meeting the press, above) was kidnapped on April 1 of this year in a Taliban-controlled region in the north of the country by an armed group who identified themselves as the Taliban to the Japanese government when seeking a ransom. According to Tsuneoka, however, they were part of Hizb-i-Islami, a military faction allied with the Afghan government.

After five months with no direct word from Tsuneoka himself, on Friday, supporters received a tweet from his account saying: "I am still alive, but in jail." A second tweet appeared shortly afterwards with his location.

Yesterday, he told journalists that one of the younger militants "came to me with a Nokia N-70 model which was the latest among their mobile phones and asked me how to use it". Tsuneoka called telephone operators for the guards to have the phone activated for web use.

He showed the guards how to access the Al-Jazeera website on the phone and then seized his opportunity: "I thought it was a chance. I told them there is a thing called 'Twitter'."

"They asked me to show them what it was, so I sent Twitter messages with the phone in front of them. Because nobody understood English, it was no problem."

He is sure he got away with the ruse undetected – and believes it was coincidence that he was set free the next day. Tsuneoka is a convert to Islam and that may have been a factor in his release – though he noted that his guards seemed irreligious.

"They are a bunch of thieves just trying to extort money from Japan,"
he said. "They don't even pray. I've never seen mujahideen who don't pray to God."" and their "knowledge of Islamic teaching was very poor". The gang were "dreadfully uneducated", he noted, adding: "They seemed to have a very simple interpretation of the world, which is that Muslims are good and non-Muslims are bad, that non-Islam believers are people who attack them."

The Japanese government say they paid no ransom to secure Tsuneoka's release – and he supported this claim saying he saw no evidence the men had been paid. ·