Reporter relives sex attack at hands of Egyptian mob

CBS reporter Lara Logan has spoken for the first time of the moment she thought was going to die in Tahrir Square, after she was sexually assaulted by an Egyptian mob the night Hosni Mubarak's government fell.

Ms Logan was in the Cairo square preparing a report for the American network's 60 Minutes programme on 11 February when the celebratory mood suddenly turned threatening. She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body.

"For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands," Ms Logan said in her first interview since the incident. She estimated that the attack involved 200 to 300 men.

Unlike physical injuries, with sexual violence, "you only have your word," Ms Logan said in the interview. "The physical wounds heal. You don't carry around the evidence the way you would if you lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan."

Until now the only public comment about the assault came four days after it took place, when Ms Logan was still in hospital. She and her producer drafted a short statement that she had "suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating."

That statement, Ms Logan said, "didn't leave me to carry the burden alone, like my dirty little secret, something that I had to be ashamed of."

The assault happened the day Ms Logan returned to Cairo, having left a week earlier after being detained and interrogated by Egyptian forces.

"The city was on fire with celebration" over Mubarak's exit, she said, comparing it to a US Super Bowl party. She and a camera crew crossed Tahrir Square, the centre of the celebrations, interviewing Egyptians and posing for photographs with people.

"There was a moment that everything went wrong," she recalled.

As her cameraman, Richard Butler, was changing a battery, Egyptian colleagues accompanying the crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms Logan's clothes off. She said: "Our local people with us said, 'We've gotta get out of here.' That was the moment the mob set on me."

Mr Butler, Ms Logan's producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were "helpless," CBS chairman Jeff Fager said, "because the mob was just so powerful." A bodyguard with the team managed to stay with Ms Logan briefly. "For Max to see the bodyguard come out of the pile without her, that was one of the worst parts," Mr Fager said. He said Ms Logan's hand "was sore for days after, from holding on so tight" to the bodyguard's hand.

They estimated that they were separated from her for about 25 minutes.

"My clothes were torn to pieces," Ms Logan said.

She declined to go into more detail about the assault but said: "They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."

After being rescued by a group of civilians and Egyptian soldiers, she was flown back to the US. "She was traumatized, as you can imagine, for a period of time," Mr Fager said. Ms Logan said she decided immediately she would speak out about sexual violence on behalf of "millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse."

Ms Logan said she had been unaware of the level of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other countries regularly experienced. "I would have paid more attention to it if I had had any sense of it," she said. "When women are harassed and subjected to this in society, they're denied an equal place in that society.

"Public spaces don't belong to them. Men control it.

"It reaffirms the oppressive role of men in the society."