Kidnapped journalist uses cell phone, Twitter to escape prison

I guess you can no longer say that Twitter is worthless, as the micro-blogging service was ingeniously used by a kidnapped Japanese journalist to signal for help. The best part of the story is that the kidnapped person tricked his captors into using Twitter in order to send out cries for help.

According to an article from PC World, journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka was imprisoned in an Afghanistan jail for at least five months and a low-ranking soldier asked him to explain the features of the Nokia N70.

Tsuneoka was happy to do this and activated the device for GPRS Internet access. The soldier had never been on the Internet before and the journalist showed the soldier how to access Al Jazeera on the go. He then pushed for the soldier to visit Twitter.

“But if you are going to do anything, you should use Twitter,” Tsuneoka said. “They asked what that was. And I told them that if you write something on it, then you can reach many Japanese journalists. So they said, ‘try it’… I don’t think they realize they were tricked.”

After sneakily accessing the micro-blogging site, the journalist wrote:

“i am still allive [sic], but in jail,” read one of his tweets.

He was freed the day after his first tweet went out.

[Via PC World, photo]