No stranger to conflict zones, Peter Greste arrived in Cairo 13 months ago for what he thought was a simple assignment: filling in for a colleague over the Christmas break.
After 400 days in an Egyptian prison, he is finally a free man.
He'd left his home in Nairobi and his job as the Kenya-based correspondent for al-Jazeera English to cover the street protests and violent government crackdowns that had engulfed Egypt in the two years after the mass street protests that brought down former president Hosni Mubarak.
But soon after he arrived in Cairo he told his family he felt increasingly unsafe working on the volatile, unpredictable streets of the capital.
"I do not feel that I can pull out a notebook or be wandering around with gear [equipment]. If I walk out on the street as a tourist, it is fine but if I am trying to practise journalism, it is difficult," his brother Andrew remembers him saying as they talked over Skype on Christmas Day.
Four days later, on December 29, 2013, Greste and his bureau chief, Canadian-Egyptian Mohamed Fahmy were arrested when security forces raided their makeshift offices in the luxury Marriott Hotel from where al-Jazeera had been operating.
Their producer, Egyptian Baher Mohamed, was arrested in his home that night.
They were quickly dubbed the "Marriott Cell" by Egypt's increasingly unhinged, pro-government media and were soon charged with terrorism-related offences, along with several other colleagues who were charged in absentia.
The three had been caught in Egypt's campaign of mass detention targeting the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood as well as politicians, journalists, activists, students and academics.
Al-Jazeera was in Egypt's crosshairs and the three journalists were the collateral damage.
The relationship between the tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar – al-Jazeera's owner – and Egypt had broken down spectacularly over al-Jazeera Arabic's perceived pro-Muslim Brotherhood coverage and its criticisms of the overthrow of the Brotherhood-backed president Mohamed Mursi in June 2013.
That Greste, Fahmy and Mohamed worked for an entirely different channel – al-Jazeera English – mattered little to Egypt's security establishment or its judiciary.
The evidence against the journalists was non-existent and they protested their innocence from the moment of their arrest.
None of the footage presented in their trial – which attracted international condemnation over its blatant attacks on media freedom – showed a conspiracy to destroy Egypt's reputation.
Most of it didn't even feature Egypt at all. Greste's award-winning documentary on Somalia, grabs taken from his computer of a media conference in Kenya, a Sky News Arabia story on tourism in Egypt, family photographs of the Grestes on holiday in Europe and photos of Fahmy taken in Libya when he worked for CNN were all presented to the court to the dismay of the defendants and media freedom groups.
Despite it all, the panel of judges – one of seven convened to hear terrorism-related cases – found against the journalists.
"They broadcast these scenes through the Qatari Jazeera channel to assist the terrorist group in achieving its purposes of influencing international public opinion," the charge read.
The three appealed and, on January 1, Egypt's Court of Cassation ordered a retrial, effectively wiping their previous conviction and sentence.
With at least 16,000 political prisoners crowding Egypt's jails – and human rights groups warning that figure might be closer to 40,000 – tensions appeared to ease between Qatar and Egypt late last year following the intervention of other Gulf states.
Qatar expelled prominent Brotherhood leaders in September and, in December, Gulf states announced the eight-month dispute over Qatar's support for the Islamist group had come to an end.
Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has previously refused to intervene in the al-Jazeera case, insisting that the independence of the Egyptian judiciary must be preserved.
However, in November, he issued a presidential decree that would allow him to repatriate foreign prisoners, raising the prospect that Greste and possibly Fahmy could be deported.
On Sunday afternoon in Cairo, with very little warning, Egyptian authorities released Greste and indicated they were preparing to do the same for Fahmy.
The fate of Mohamed, serving the longest sentence of the three, remains unclear – he cannot be deported as he is in Egyptian citizen.
Against the odds, the three have campaigned tirelessly for media freedom from within the walls of their prison cell.
In the first two letters his supporters smuggled out of Tora Prison, Greste noted there was no room for dissent in Egypt.
"This is not just about three al-Jazeera journalists. Our arrest and continued detention sends a clear and unequivocal message to all journalists covering Egypt, both foreign and local," Greste wrote just over a year ago.
"The state will not tolerate hearing from the Muslim Brotherhood or any other critical voices. The prisons are overflowing with anyone who opposes or challenges the government."
In the second letter, he says: "The fact that we were arrested for what seems to be a set of relatively uncontroversial stories tells us a lot about what counts as 'normal' and what is dangerous in post-revolutionary Egypt."
Greste, 49, left Australia in 1991 to work for Reuters TV, CNN, WTN and the BBC, and by 1995 he was the correspondent in Afghanistan for the BBC and Reuters. He later worked for the BBC in London and as one of the network's correspondents in Mexico and Chile.
He returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and worked across the Middle East and Latin America until finding a home in Africa for the past nine years and a job with al-Jazeera English, most recently based out of Nairobi.
He was awarded the prestigious Peabody Award in 2011 for a documentary he produced for the BBC, Somalia: A Land of Anarchy.
"Africa is his passion," his brother Andrew told me in February last year. "He's been in Kenya for nearly 10 years."
But now all that is up in the air.
The priority is his recovery from a harrowing 13 months in prison.
All along, his family – who have maintained a punishing travel schedule to ensure there was always someone to visit him, someone to liaise with the Australian embassy, someone to campaign for his freedom in Egypt, in Kenya, in Britain and Australia – have said Greste has coped well with his incarceration.
His release from prison, and the relief of not having to serve out a seven-year prison sentence on false charges, will go a long way to assist in that recovery.
Fahmy is expected to be released in the coming days but Mohamed faces the horrifying prospect of remaining in prison until the retrial and the possibility of another long jail sentence.
Given Greste's commitment to media freedom, one thing seems certain – he will not allow his colleagues to remain in prison without raising his voice in their defence and continuing to campaign for their release.
