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Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera’s journalist held for 6 1/2 years at Guantanamo Bay, has returned to Doha – headquarters of the channel – to a hero’s welcome.
A throng of about 200 supporters greeted him at the airport, waving flags and launching white doves in the air.
Back at the Al Jazeera compound, a “freedom celebration” (as Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera’s director general called it) was held in his honour.
“Its been more than 2,500 days that I’ve been dreaming of this moment,” he said.
In his speech at Al Jazeera, he thanked millions of people around the world for their support while he suffered both physical and psychological torture at Guantanamo, but said his freedom would not be complete until colleague Tayseer Allouni, currently held under house arrest in Granada, Spain was also free.
As for his career, Sami said “it is no crime to be a journalist” and that he would continue. Khanfar told me what role Sami would now take on at the network is still to be determined.
You can read the story on the AJE website, and pretty much only there (in English), as no Western media or wire services carried it.
Even the blogosphere had relatively light coverage.
Here’s Hoda’s pkg on the day’s events: