Kiwi back on job after jail time in Yemen

Glen Johnson with his mother Lin. Photo / Supplied

Kiwi journalist Glen Johnson, freed from jail in Yemen this week, is heading to Egypt to start chasing his next story - and says anyone who believes he is putting himself at undue risk doesn't know the region well enough.

Speaking to the media for the first time since his release on Wednesday, Johnson said he did not intend to return home to New Zealand for a couple of years.

He was held for more than two weeks in prison after entering Yemen illegally on a boat from the African country of Djibouti. He had been working on a story about people smuggling.

Johnson, a freelance journalist, is not revealing the details on that story, or giving much away about his prison time, as he is writing his story to sell. He said, however, he was not physically harmed.

"I was detained in various political prisons as the Yemeni intelligence services attempted to establish whether or not I was al-Qaeda, or so they - to my mind rather strangely - claimed later," Johnson said. "The lack of basic rights associated with political prisons - no phone calls, no right to a lawyer, complete isolation - was particularly difficult.

"I didn't fear for my safety at all during the numerous interrogations, but was becoming worried that I may have to serve out a fairly lengthy sentence, or remain incommunicado for a while."

Johnson was deported to Dubai on Thursday and is heading to Cairo next. He got out with only two T-shirts, one pair of boxers, one pair of pants and a pair of shoes, but no socks.

"I'm planning to do a story on high-end cocaine use in Cairo with an Egyptian journalist. Then back to Sudan to look at the black market trade in gold.

"I think in a couple of years I may come home for a holiday, but I don't know what I'd do. Probably sit around twiddling my thumbs."

He said people who thought he took unnecessary risks did not understand the work he did and it reflected "broader misconceptions about the Middle East; you know, that Arabs are completely hopeless and the Middle East is all car bombs and war and violence".

"The fact is, I am very rarely in dangerous situations and the people, whether Arab or Jew or Iranian, always go out of their way to help me.

It is the brave and reputable local reporters that no one in the West talks about who usually suffer the consequences when they go about their jobs - severe beatings, threats, murder, arrests and censorship - not the big-shot Western journalists with their big Kevlar vests, bigger drinking habits and even bigger egos."

He went to extreme lengths to follow the people smugglers, but said that was the only way to tell the story of desperate Africans taking huge risks to get into the Middle East.

He said he needed to see the journey they made. Not doing that would have gone against the grain.

"That's lazy journalism. And I don't want to be that kind of reporter."

He said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had played a key role in his release and said the Kiwi embassy in Riyadh was "superb".