Looking gaunt and walking stiffly, he stepped into the outside world before daybreak, clutched by Hamas officials and surrounded by men waving guns in the air.

After being in captivity for 114 days, making him the longest-held Westerner in the radicalised and impoverished Gaza Strip, he laughed, saying it was an 'amazing thing to be free'.

The Briton was captured in Gaza City on March 12 by the Army of Islam militant group.

At a news conference with Hamas officials, he described his experience as 'occasionally terrifying'. He said: 'The last 16 weeks, of course, were just the very worst you can imagine of my life, like being buried alive, really, removed from the world.'

According to a BBC News report yesterday, he said he was not tortured, although he had twice fallen sick from food he was fed.

He said he had been held in four different locations, two of them only briefly. Often in 'solitary confinement', he spent three months unable to see the sun.

He was once chained for 24 hours and beaten 'a bit' in the last half-hour before he was released, he said.

He feared for his life immediately after being seized, and when his captors put an explosives-rigged vest on him. He appeared in a chilling video on June 24, saying his captors had strapped a bomb-belt on him and threatened to detonate it should any rescue attempt be made.

He said his one lucky break was getting a radio and being able to listen to the BBC. 'I began to realise the extraordinary extent of support that there was.'

His ordeal had sparked rallies and messages of support across the globe, and an online petition calling for his release was signed by about 200,000 people.

He said his kidnappers, headed by a man known as Abu Khaled, were 'often rude and unpleasant', and they 'did threaten my life a number of times in various ways'.

He described his captors as a small jihadi group focused less on the Palestinian conflict with Israel than on 'getting a knife into Britain in some way', he said.

In exchange for Mr Johnston, a native of Scotland who had covered Gaza for three years, the Army of Islam originally demanded that Britain free a radical Islamic cleric with ties to Al-Qaeda.

After his release yesterday, Mr Johnston was hustled to a press conference with Mr Ismail Haniyeh, the former Palestinian prime minister who now heads the Hamas regime in Gaza.

Hamas had demanded the journalist's freedom since seizing control of Gaza last month.

Mr Haniyeh draped a Palestinian flag around the journalist's shoulders - which he removed quickly - and pinned a Palestinian flag pin on his blue blazer.

After breakfast with Mr Haniyeh, the Briton set out for Jerusalem with British diplomats and arrived at Britain's consulate there later in the morning.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed the news of Mr Johnston's release, and the government thanked Palestinian officials for their role in securing his freedom.

The journalist's parents were overjoyed. A smiling Graham Johnston and his wife Margaret said they had a very brief and joyful telephone conversation with their son.

'All he said was 'Hello Dad', and I said 'Hello son, how are you? Are you all right?', and he said 'I'm 100 per cent', and then the phone was cut. So that's all we've had from him so far,' Mr Johnston told reporters outside his home in Scotland.

'We've seen him on the box, and it's just incredible. It's been a long 114 days.'

ASSOCIATED PRESS, REUTERS