Emotions ‘boiling’ for Greste

WITH barely any notice and only minutes to grab his things and hug and say goodbye to colleagues, Australian journalist Peter Greste was taken from his cell in Cairo and told he was to be immediately deported to Australia.

But for Greste, 49, it was as good as being told he was free to leave the cell that had been his home for more than a year for him and two journalist colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian-Egyptian, and Baher Mohamed of Egypt.

“I went for a run and the prison warden called me over and told me, ‘It’s time to pack your stuff and go’,” he told his network Al Jazeera from Cyprus yesterday, where he was in transit to Brisbane.

Greste said he had a “mix of boiling emotions” about his sudden release. “I feel incredible angst about my colleagues, leaving them behind,” he said.

“Amid all this relief, I still feel a sense of concern.

“If it’s appropriate for me to be free, it’s right for all of them to be freed.”

From being told he was out to leaving the jail happened in less than an hour. He described his roller-coaster ride of emotions as a “sense of relief and excitement but also real stress in having to say goodbye to my colleagues and friends — people who’ve really become family inside that prison”.

They were preparing for a retrial and thinking of nothing else. He didn’t believe it was real until after he was picked up by a member of the Australian embassy and had his “backside on the plane seat”.