Reporter Anthony Shadid, who is the paper’s Beirut bureau chief, wrote a joint piece for his newspaper along with photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks, and videographer Stephen Farrell.

After being captured by forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi at a checkpoint in Ajdabiya they were beaten and their hands and legs were bound.

Addario was punched in the face, Farrell and Hicks were hit, and Shadid was headbutted. It was the beginning of regular beatings.

Sometimes they were treated well until they were handed over to a rougher group. Hicks was threatened with beheading. Then they were blindfolded and driven to Gaddafi’s home town of Surt.

“The next afternoon,” they wrote, “was perhaps the worst beating. As we stood on the tarmac in Surt, waiting for a military plane to Tripoli, Tyler was slapped and punched, and Anthony was hit with the butt of a gun to the head. We were blindfolded and bound another time with plastic handcuffs, and Lynsey was groped again.”

They were flown to Tripoli and could hear people arguing about their fate. They spent four days in relatively benign circumstances before being released into the han ds of Turkish diplomats.

In a separate article, Addario told of being continually sexually assaulted while in captivity. Soon after the four were detained, one man grabbed her breasts, “the beginning of a pattern of disturbing behaviour.”

She said: “There was a lot of groping. Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.”
Addario, a Pulitzer prize-winner, told of an occasion when a man caressed her head in a sick, tender way while saying: “You’re going to die tonight. You’re going to die tonight”.

Source: New York Times/New York Times

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