Lara Logan talks about the night she thought she'd die

The CBS News correspondent who was attacked in Cairo's Tahrir Square tells the New York Times that she was surrounded by 200-300 men who tore at her clothes, beat her and "for an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands.” She estimates the attack went on for 40 minutes.

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

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms. Logan’s pants off. She said: “Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me.”

Mr. Butler, Ms. Logan’s producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were “helpless,” Mr. Fager said, “because the mob was just so powerful.” A bodyguard who had been hired to accompany the team was able to stay with Ms. Logan for a brief period of time.

“For Max,” the producer, “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 “described how her hand was sore for days after — and then she realized it was from holding on so tight” to the bodyguard’s hand.

“My clothes were torn to pieces,” Ms. Logan said.

She declined to go into more detail about the assault but said: “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”

Logan is scheduled to talk about the attack and its aftermath this Sunday on "60 Minutes." She tells the show's Scott Pelley: "There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying. I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever."

Previously on LA Observed:
CBS' Lara Logan sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square, network announces *
NYU journo resigns over flippant Lara Logan tweets LA Weekly admits it reached on Lara Logan *