Japan journalist says he tricked captors with Twitter

This photo taken on September 7, 2010 shows Japanese freelance journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka during a press conference in Tokyo after returning to Japan following five months' captivity in Afghanistan.

TOKYO: A Japanese freelance journalist freed after a five-month hostage ordeal in Afghanistan says he used Twitter to announce he was still alive under the noses of his captors, who did not understand English.
Kosuke Tsuneoka, 41, who had been missing in northern Afghanistan since April, was speaking in Tokyo following his hand-over Saturday to the Japanese embassy in Kabul.
Addressing the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan on Tuesday, he said he was held hostage by a military faction called Hizb-i-Islami (Islamic Party), which is allied with the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Tsuneoka said that one of his captors “came to me with a Nokia N-70 model which was the
latest among their mobile phones and asked me how to use it. I thought it was a chance.”
He called telephone operators to activate the Internet access, he said, then showed his captors how to go online, accessing Al Jazeera's website.
“Then 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.”The September 3 posts on the micro-blogging website a short message that said “i am still alive, but in jail”, followed by a second tweet giving his location were Tsuneoka's first signs of life in months.
Tsuneoka said he was still unsure why he was released the following day. “I don't think there is any correlation,” he said.
He supported a statement by his government that no ransom money was paid.
On Saturday, he said, he was told he would be freed that day. “They told me to shampoo my hair, so I washed my hair, half in doubt,” he said.
Tsuneoka, a convert to Islam, added: “They said I would be released because I am a Muslim, but I doubt it, because they don't even pray. I've never seen mujahedeen (holy warriors) who don't pray to God.”He was taken by car to a nearby village, from where he said officials from the presidential office drove him to a nearby highway and on to Kabul.
Speaking about his time in captivity, Tsuneoka said his guards were friendly and gave him three meals a day but were “dreadfully uneducated” and that “even their knowledge of Islamic teaching was very poor.”
“When I told one of them that my marriage broke up five months after the wedding, he asked me 'did you kill your ex-wife?',” the journalist recounted.
“I said 'no way', but he said he would have killed her in my position.”Tsuneoka added: “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.”Even though the area of his captivity in the Kunduz and Takhar provinces is meant to be controlled by government-allied forces, his captors and local residents “hated the commander and hated President Karzai,” he said.
“The Taliban was extremely popular. Each of the soldiers had a mobile phone, but the compressed videos they kept in their handsets were all about the Taliban, and they sang a song celebrating the Taliban.” – AFP