With exclusive access to Alan Johnston, his family and the behind-the-scenes hostage negotiators, a Panorama special on BBC One tells the extraordinary story of the BBC correspondent’s 114 days held in captivity by the Army of Islam, a fanatical jihadist group in Gaza.

In a revealing interview with Jeremy Vine, Alan recalls the moments he feared he would be executed and explains how he composed himself in the face of death threats from his captors.

He tells of how his car was ambushed on the day of his kidnapping: “Very quickly he was alongside me pointing the gun through the door. I was vaguely aware of another gunman coming out of the other side of the kidnappers’ car and I knew immediately what was happening.”

When he was taken to a room in an apartment in Gaza: “The handcuffs were uncomfortably biting into my wrists and I felt I might ease that by-by sitting up, and it was this moment, I just had … an image of myself sitting there in that dingy room, handcuffed, a hood over my head and this profound feeling that I was at the lowest, lowest ebb of my life, in real danger, frightened.”

Of his kidnappers’ motives he says: “If you want to make jihad against Britain from Gaza, you have very few options. There’s no … large British diplomatic presence, there’s no British school, no British Airways, no British business. There’s just the BBC. And even in the BBC, there’s only one British citizen. It was me, and they had me.”

He adds: “I used to sometimes think rather bleakly that … of my place where I was being held, I used to think of it to myself as the Hotel Jihad and I used to think that all the dawns were false in the Hotel Jihad.”

Kidnapped: The Alan Johnston Story – a Panorama special, Thursday 25 October, 9pm, BBC One