Peter Greste Returns Home to Australia after jail in Egypt

Al-Jazeera journalist Peter Greste has returned to Brisbane, Australia, to be reunited with his family following his release from an Egyptian prison.

At a news conference he described his relief and praised the long campaign to free him and his colleagues.

Mr Greste and two colleagues were arrested in 2013. They were convicted of spreading false news and aiding the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The jailing of the journalists sparked an international outcry.

Speaking in Brisbane, Mr Greste thanked the Australian government, the public and his family for launching such a big campaign to free him and his colleagues.

“If I appreciated my family beforehand, what they have given me… I know more than anyone else perhaps that this campaign would not have had half the momentum if it was not for the incredible contribution of my parents and my brothers,” he said.

He did not give details of the conditions in which the three journalists had been held but said they had spent a lot of time exercising to keep themselves fit. He said he had also spent a lot of time meditating.

Asked about the future, Mr Greste turned to his mother, Lois, saying “Mum, would you mind closing your ears for the moment?”, at which she laughed and said: “Oh dear, I know what’s coming.”

“I don’t want to give this up – my job. I’m a correspondent, it’s what I do,” Mr Greste said. “How I do it, whether I actually do go ahead with it, I don’t know. That’s the way I feel right now.”

Mr Greste’s colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, remain in prison.

Andrew Harding, BBC News, Brisbane

Behind the genuine smiles and the relief, Peter Greste is still wrestling with the knowledge that his colleagues Baher Mohamed and Mohammed Fahmy remain in prison in Cairo, and that his own public comments could yet influence their fates.

“It was tough leaving them behind. A real part of me feels that I should have dug my heels in,” and refused to leave the prison without them, Peter told me, while acknowledging that would have been “the wrong decision.”

And so, in public, he is cautious in his comments about the Egyptian authorities, and reluctant to discuss the details of his own incarceration, or the sensitive and ongoing diplomatic negotiations about his al-Jazeera colleagues.

Source:BBC