PC World reports that Kosuke Tsuneoka had been held in captivity for five months when a low-ranking soldier showed him his new cellphone, a Nokia N70. The soldier didn't know how to use the phone or the Internet, so he asked Tsuneoka to show him.
Tsuneoka activated the Internet service on the phone by calling a support line and showed his captors how to read news from Al-Jazeera on the device. He then said that they should check out Twitter because they could use it to reach other journalists. Tsuneoka took the phone and used Twitter's web interface to send two tweets in English:
The next day he was released, but his release didn't seem to have anything to do with the tweets. The Associated Press speculates that Tsuneoka was released because he is a Muslim; he converted in 2000. This was actually the second time he had been taken into captivity on the job. The first was in Georgia in 2001.