The flight carrying Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Mohammed, arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport a short time ago.

Gibbons, who was greeted by her two children, told waiting reporters that she was in “total shock” at what had happened. “I’m just an ordinary middle-aged primary school teacher,” she said.

Asked about the predicament she had found herself, she admitted that the word “terrifying” was an understatement.

She said she was held in two jails, before the Sudanese Ministry of the Interior sent her a bed – “probably the best present I’ve ever had.”

The British government thanked Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for her “early” release. Al-Bashir is an Islamic hard-liner who has been encouraging genocide by Sudan’s Arab tribes of the indigenous non-Arab African population of Sudan’s Darfur region.

Gibbons had been held at a secret location in Sudan since thousands of protesters marched on Friday carrying weapons and demanding she be killed.

Meanwhile, now that Gibbons has landed back home safely, British press reaction online has been quick to condemn Sudan.

Britain’s most popular newspaper, The Sun, has a banner heading on its website with the word “LIBERATED,” with the “TED” in big red letters. The paper writes:

Good-natured Gillian Gibbons would cross a busy street to avoid giving offence. She left a safe and comfortable home to help some of Africa’s most tragically deprived children… But she was jailed for a crime she did not commit. The trumped-up charges put her life at risk from sabre-wielding mobs.

Under the heading “Cruel state is laid bear” The Daily Mirror says:

We must hear those thousands of innocent Sudanese victims of intolerance who have nobody to speak out for them – because they aren’t British.

The Daily Telegraph, echoing the feelings of many about the weak British government reaction to the incident, writes:

“[Britain’s] foreign secretary David Miliband expressed gratitude for the intervention of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir in the process of freeing her. The president had, he said, “brought common sense” into what had been a case of “innocent misunderstanding”.
But common sense and innocence are concepts that seem rather bizarrely inappropriate in any discussion of President Bashir’s murderous regime.
The delight and mutual congratulations that have characterised the agreement between the Sudanese dictator and the British authorities on the release of a blameless schoolteacher presents a nauseating picture.… For Sudan to be able defiantly to humiliate a major democratic nation from which it receives large amounts of aid by holding one of its citizens to ransom speaks of the impunity with which it believes it can operate in the world.
… Bashir, who has been responsible for some of the worst atrocities in post-war history, has successfully blocked the deployment of peacekeeping forces that would protect Darfur civilians.
It is that failure of international resolve which encourages him to believe that he can flout moral and diplomatic conventions. As we argued last week, we should recall our ambassador and consider sanctions against the regime.

And in case you missed it our own Mark Steyn has this to say on the matter:

Last week, Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher working in Khartoum, one of the crummiest basket-case dumps on the planet – whoops, I mean one of the most lively and vibrant strands in the rich tapestry of our multicultural world – anyway, Mrs. Gibbons was sentenced last week to 15 days in jail because she was guilty of, er, allowing a teddy bear to be named “Mohammed”. She wasn’t so foolish as to name the teddy Mohammed herself. But, in an ill-advised Sudanese foray into democracy, she’d let her grade-school students vote on what name they wanted to give the classroom teddy, and being good Muslims they voted for their favorite name: Mohammed. Big mistake. There’s apparently a whole section in the Koran about how if you name cuddly toys after the Prophet you have to be decapitated.