A JAPANESE JOURNALIST held hostage in Afghanistan managed to trick his captors into sending a Twitter message out saying he was still alive.

AP reports that Kosuke Tsuneoka was approached by one of his captors and asked if he could help set up his new mobile phone.

The journalist said that while younger members of the militant group wanted to check Al-Jazeera on the phone, he shifted their attention to Twitter.

“I’m sure they never thought they were tricked,” he said after his release, Time reports.

Tsuneoka was released to the Japanese embassy on Saturday, in part because he is Muslim. Japan insists it never paid any ransom for his safe return. The militants were part of the Hizb-e-Islami group, not the Taliban.

He said that during his five-month captivity, he thought that he would be killed, and tried to prepare himself for death. When a deadline issued to Japan passed without incident, he began to grow more confident that he would survive.

It wasn’t Tsuneoka’s first time in captivity: he had been held hostage in Georgia for several months in 2001. He says he is keen to head back to Afghanistan, but realises he might need to exercise more caution this time around:

I’m ready to go back right now. But after all the trouble, I have to think how not to repeat the same mistake. That’s the problem.