Lara Logan: I Was Stripped, Nearly Scalped

(Newser) – CBS correspondent Lara Logan was convinced she was dying as she was sexually molested by a crazed mob of Egyptian men, but was saved at the last minute by a woman wearing a burka. All she could see was "just her eyes," she said on 60 Minutes last night. "She put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can't tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn't safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn't just about me anymore." The woman led Logan to a soldier who extricated her from the mob. Logan was attacked as she covered the uprising at Tahrir Square in February. She was stripped and her hair was snatched from her head, reports the New York Daily News.

"They were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp. Not trying to pull out my hair, holding big wads of it literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull," she recalled. "The more I screamed, it turned them into a frenzy." As her clothes were torn off, she saw flashes of cell phone cameras. "I didn't even know that they were beating me with sticks because the sexual assault was all I could feel, their hands raping me over and over and over again." There was "no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying," she said.
She finally stopped fighting, hoping her submission would save her life because she wanted so desperately to see her two young children again. Click for more on her ordeal.