JERUSALEM - It took just moments for Alan Johnston to realise on March 12 that the nightmare scenario he had imagined thousands of times during his three years as BBC correspondent in Gaza had become a reality.
As he turned into a quiet Gaza City street on his drive home from work on that fateful Monday, a car screeched out of nowhere to the side of his vehicle.
"For a second I just thought it was a bit of Gaza driving, but it turned out to be much more than that," the veteran newsman said at a press conference in Jerusalem just hours after his release.
"A car pulled off in front of me, there was a guy in the street with a pistol, the next thing, a guy coming around the passenger side with a Kalashnikov and I really began to realise very quickly.
"I've been in Gaza for three years, I've covered 27 kidnappings and I knew what it was about. And I imagine what it would be like thousands of times and it was exactly like that. A slightly surreal experience, as if I've lived it before because I imagined it so many times."
Before he knew it, he was in the back seat of a strange car, with his hands cuffed behind his back, a hood over his head and strangers' hands going through his clothes.
"They were pulling the money out of my pockets and laughing. I'd been to the bank and they had reason to laugh, they'd hit the jackpot. Off came my watch and clothes, passports and we were racing through town."
He was quickly bundled into a flat and forced on to his stomach, with the hood and the cuffs still on, where he remained for a several hours before his captors came in and took them off.
"All the time I was wondering, is this one of the kind of benign Gaza kidnaps, where it's a family dispute and it's over in four or five days... or whether it was a jihadi group that had struck in August that I was always worried about tangling with them.
"And around midnight, a door swung open and the guy filling it (was) with a red and white ghutra (headdress) wrapped around his head and it was clear that it was the second type of kidnapping and I was clearly in a lot of trouble.
"He said I wouldn't be killed, I wouldn't be tortured, I would be treated with respect as a Muslim prisoner and that turned out to be be true. But you really don't know whether to believe a man with a red ghutra wrapped around his head."
To the man, who described himself as the leader of the Army of Islam group, Johnston was a Westerner and therefore a legitimate target in "the war between Muslims and non-Muslims."
The man was unmoved when Johnston -- the only Western reporter still permanently based in increasingly lawless Gaza at the time of his abduction -- tried to explain that he was not at war with anyone and worked to tell the Gaza story to the outside world.
"He said I made a nice speech... but he clearly wasn't impressed."
And so began 114 days of solitary confinement with no sunlight, "a battle to keep your mind in the right place... this weird dark world with all the shutters drawn" that Johnston and his sole guard stalked around in as "week after week after week rumbled by."
His sole human contact was a moody guard, who was friendly one day and flew into rages the next, and the two made "the weirdest of the odd couples that ever was."
Early Wednesday morning he was bundled into a car and driven to a spot where he was dragged out toward more gunmen. Not knowing what was going on, he suddenly noticed a familiar photographer in a crowd gathered round and then a colleague.
"And it was over... it was the most extraordinary moment of my life."
Asked whether he would remain in Gaza, Johnston said: "I spent three years covering Gaza as a correspondent and I spent four months in solitary confinement there and I feel enough already with Gaza."
07/04/2007 16:59 GMT