Under the circumstances, Daniel Rye Ottosen is well and is now being reunited with his family.

The Rye Ottosen family would like to take this opportunity to extend heartfelt thanks to everyone who has assisted them in getting Daniel home.

Daniel’s case has been known to the Danish press for a long time, but out of consideration for Daniel’s safety, everyone has refrained from covering the story. The press is requested to continue to show consideration and discretion.

The family does not wish to comment further. The Rye Ottosen family does not wish to have contact with the media or other outsiders and would like to thank you for your understanding.

Despite the timing, Danish Intelligence wanted to ask Daniel some questions straight away about his capture in order to gather evidence about ISIS.

‘I can’t cope with that right now,’ said Daniel.

‘No, I quite understand,’ replied the PET man and he remained seated.

Daniel wondered why there seemed to be such a rush. Couldn’t it wait until the day after, the week after? What if he had been released and had to stay in hospital for a week?

Eventually, the PET agent left Daniel and Anita alone, while the crisis psychologist went into the room next door so that he was close by if they needed him.

Daniel went into the bathroom and closed the door. His time was his own and there was no guard outside waiting with a stick. He sat down on the clean toilet and stayed there a long time. It was so wonderful to be able to shit in peace that he began to cry. Then he turned on the shower. The water gushed out of the huge shower head above him, while he filled the scrubbing glove with gel and scrubbed the dirt off his body. The foam slid down over his skin. He made the shower warmer and shaved off the beard on his cheeks and his moustache. He stood under the warm, clean water for a long time and washed off thirteen months of captivity.

He threw all his clothes out of the bag Anita had brought with her and put on an old, washed-out T-shirt that the boys from his boarding school had made. There was a picture on the chest of them all together with his apple-green car. He took a beer out of the fridge for himself and one for Anita too.

‘I bring greetings with me,’ she told him and went through the gifts, photographs and letters in the order that the crisis psychologist had suggested.

Daniel was given a picture of some boys he had gone to Free School with. One of them had become a father and was sitting with his daughter on his lap. There were pictures of Christina with their grandparents and one of Anita’s boyfriend sitting in a kayak. Susanne and Kjeld had also written a letter, and Susanne had sent a Lego set of The Simpsons to Daniel, with the mini-figures of Homer, Bart, Lisa, Maggie and Marge that were the new hit at Legoland. Daniel and Anita looked at each other and laughed when Daniel unpacked them.

‘It’s good that she’s still herself,’ said Daniel, looking at the figures. ‘It’s just like Mum.’

In one picture, Signe was sitting on a beach. But she wasn’t there for him any more, he thought, and the proof-of-life question about how they had met now felt hollow and misleading.

Daniel and Anita lay under their blankets as he told her everything that had happened to him without censoring anything. She finally found out how he got the marks on his neck. The story of how he had tried to commit suicide to escape the torture was the worst. Anita’s and the family’s darkest fears had been correct.

Anita noticed that her brother was constantly eating. When they left the room so that Daniel could smoke a cigarette outside, there was a used plate with some French fries still on it, which he picked at in passing.

He asked for an Internet connection to see what the Danish media were writing about him, but Anita refused. Now wasn’t the time for him to be relating to other people’s opinions of him.

They didn’t sleep all night, but lay under the blankets, talking until first light.

The next morning brunch was laid out on long tables in the hotel restaurant. Daniel filled his plate, while watching a couple sitting across from each other at one of the tables. The man had his newspaper and iPad in front of him, as well as a mobile alongside. Daniel was surprised that someone could sit opposite his wife in such a nice place, so deeply buried in electronic gizmos.

When he had eaten his fill, he had conversations with the psychologist and the PET agent, before he had a chance to call Christina, who was on her way to an exam, with the mobile he had finally been given.

‘They’re going completely berserk in the media,’ said Christina.

‘Really, what’re they saying?’ asked Daniel, who knew that no one in the family had said anything about his situation.

There were already several articles about Daniel on Danish newspaper websites. His former mentor, the photographer Jan Grarup, had said that Daniel ‘was aware that Syria is a dangerous place, but he may not have been completely updated on how dangerous it really is’.

One newspaper also wrote that they had information that he ‘had primarily been held in an area around the town of Raqqa’, which wasn’t true.

In another article from the news agency Ritzau, the headline said, ‘Leading Psychologist: Danish hostage will never be the same.’ The article described how traumatic an experience it is to be a hostage.

On another website an article began with the phrase ‘In May, two days after Daniel Rye Ottosen ignored Foreign Ministry warnings and travelled to Syria for the first time, everything went wrong’ – this ignored the fact that journalists and photographers often don’t follow the Ministry’s travel advice, because it would make it impossible for them to report from the world’s conflict and disaster areas.

Generally, the media contained a lot of discussion about how defensible it was for a young photographer to have gone into Syria when the security risk was so great. But several articles were erroneously comparing the situation now with that which existed more than a year ago. When Daniel was captured in May 2013 very few journalists in Denmark had even heard of ISIS. It was very different in June 2014, because ISIS had grown and had taken control of large areas of northern Syria and captured Mosul in Iraq. One newspaper conveniently failed to mention that its own young reporter was in northern Syria at that very moment.

Journalists sitting comfortably at home in Denmark, ignorant of the details surrounding his capture, were now analysing everything that Daniel had been blaming himself for during the last thirteen months. He had often regretted that he went into Syria with Aya and that he hadn’t insisted on travelling with his original fixer, Mahmoud. He had often asked himself whether he had been too unprepared, and whether it had been naive of him to travel to Syria when he had never been to the Middle East before. But the guilt had faded gradually as the prison cells he sat in were filled with hostages, several of whom had far more experience than him.

The articles in the media revived all his old guilt. Anita noticed that his face had turned as white as a sheet and suggested that he call Pierre, who had also been through the experience of coming home after being held captive by ISIS.

Daniel sat on the orange sofa in the foyer and ate half a chocolate bar, while talking to Pierre over Skype. Pierre had hated his own homecoming, because, unlike Daniel’s, it had been a hero’s welcome. President Hollande had spoken about how proud he was that the nation had Frenchmen like Pierre, who went to Syria to report on the situation.

Pierre reassured Daniel that no matter what the media in Denmark wrote – or what the president of France had to say – about everything they had experienced in Syria, none of them knew what had really happened.