Alan Johnston

From nowhere to the most terrible place

The Observer, December 2007

At the beginning of March, even people at the BBC hadn’t heard of Alan Johnston. He was 44 and bald, and his work as a reporter in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Gaza had earned him a reputation for adventurousness and composure, but these were not attributes to set him apart from the rest of the crowd on the World Service and From Our Own Correspondent. You wouldn’t have recognised him in the street, and you would struggle to quote a memorable line from any of his dispatches.

In one of these reports from January 2006, towards the end of his second year in Gaza, he had mused on the peculiarities of the local kidnap. ‘In Iraq an abduction can end in the most brutal murder,’ he said. ‘But fortunately Gaza is not Iraq, nothing like it. So far, all the foreigners kidnapped here have been freed quite quickly and unharmed.’

He listed three obscure militant groups that he likened to the Keystone Cops. He did not mention the Army of Islam, whose members hustled him from his car in spring sunshine on 12 March and brought his period of professional obscurity to a close.

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