SYDNEY (AP) – For more than a year, the three jailed Al-Jazeera journalists did their best to prepare for the unsettling possibility that one of them would be released from the Egyptian prison, while the others were forced to stay. But when that day actually came, journalist Peter Greste struggled to leave behind the men who had become his brothers.
“See you when I see you,” Greste recalled telling his colleagues, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohammed, just before he left the prison on Sunday after 400 days behind bars in a case widely condemned as a sham by human rights activists.
On Thursday, Greste returned home to Australia, relieved and jubilant in his freedom, but still grappling with the reality that Fahmy and Mohammed remained trapped in their cells.
“You can imagine after 400 days in prison with these guys, we’re very close and it was very difficult to leave them behind,” Greste, 49, told reporters in the Queensland state capital of Brisbane, flanked by members of his family. “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.”
The three journalists were arrested in 2013 over their coverage of the violent crackdown on Islamist protests following the military overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi. Egyptian authorities accused them of providing a platform for Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, now declared a terrorist organization, though officials never provided concrete evidence.