Imagined this moment 400 times, says freed Al Jazeera journalist

Journalist Peter Greste arrived in Australia and been reunited with his family after 400 days in a Cairo jail.

Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist, was greeted by dozens of supporters at Brisbane airport in the early hours of Thursday morning, and said he was “ecstatic” to be home.

The Al Jazeera journalist was arrested in 2013 with colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed and sentenced to seven years in prison for aiding the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I can’t tell you how ecstatic I am to be here this is a moment,” Greste said.

“This is a moment that I’ve rehearsed in my mind over the last 400 days and it feels absolutely awesome to be here,” I didn’t think I’d see this day. I imagined it many, many times -- about 400 times in fact.”

Father Juris Greste, who along with wife Louis fought for his son’s release, said seeing his son return was like “holding him for the first time”.

Flanked by his parents and two brothers, the Al Jazeera correspondent said the frustrations of jail had forced him to re-evaluate his life, in “the kind of experience that people talk about when they approach death”.

He said, “This felt partly like a rebirth, but also like a near-death experience, in the sense that I was really given the opportunity to look back at my life again, to look back at the screw-ups that I made, to appreciate all the things that I’ve done and experienced in ways that I’ve never really understood in the past.”

The journalist said, “I didn’t see a whole lot of sunsets in the last 400 or 500 days or so. I haven’t seen the stars a lot. I’m really keen to get out there and enjoy those little things. Those are the bits and pieces that really make life worthwhile.”

A career in journalism, however, did not count among his mistakes, despite the fate it dealt him in Cairo: asked what his next steps would be, Greste expressed a desire to get back to work.

“I don’t want to give this job up,” he said. “I’m a correspondent. It’s what I do. How I do it, whether I do actually go ahead with it, I don’t know. But that’s the way I feel right now.”

Asked about the other journalists who were jailed along with him, he said, “"You can imagine after 400 days in prison with these guys, we’re very close and it was very difficult to leave them behind.”

The 49-year-old added, “But I'm grateful to be out. I trust that they will follow in due course ... It's going to take some further efforts, but we'll see them out. And when we do, I'm going to party with them very, very hard indeed."