Top CBS journalist Lara Logan has spoken for the first time about being attacked in Cairo more than two months ago, saying a mob of more than 200 men "raped me with their hands".
Logan, 40, was covering the downfall of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's regime on February 11 when a section of the crowd in Tahrir Square turned on her and her colleagues.
In her first interview since the attack, South African-born Logan told The New York Times she believed she was going to die.
"For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands," she told the newspaper.
Logan estimated the assault, which took place amid feverish celebration on the night Mubarak stepped down, lasted about 40 minutes and involved between 200 and 300 men.
She and a camera crew were preparing a piece for 60 Minutes. The program will air an extended interview with Logan in the United States this Sunday.
"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying," Logan told the news program.
"I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just torturous death that's going to go on forever."
The group had ventured into the square to interview celebrating Egyptians. Logan likened the atmosphere to a Super Bowl party, saying the city "was on fire with celebration".
But the group, accompanied by Egyptian colleagues and a bodyguard, soon felt the mood turn sour.
"There was a moment when everything went wrong," she said.
While camera operator Richard Butler was changing a battery their Egyptian colleagues overheard men talking about wanting to take Logan's pants off, she told the newspaper.
"Our local people with us said, 'We've gotta get out of here'. That was literally the moment the mob set on me," Logan said.
Jeff Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, who helped Logan draft a brief statement released while she was recovering in hospital, said the men travelling with Logan found themselves "helpless" against the powerful mob.
The bodyguard, who was hired to stay with the crew, managed to stay with Logan for a moment or two longer than Butler, producer Max McClellan, and two drivers.
"For Max to see the bodyguard come out of the pile without her, that was one of the worst parts," Fager said.
Logan said her clothes "were torn to pieces".
"What really struck me was how merciless they were," she said, refusing to go into further detail about the nature of the attack.
"They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."
A group of Egyptian soldiers and civilians rescued Logan and she was flown back to the United States.
She returned to work this month and will give an extended interview to 60 Minutes in the US on Sunday.
"You only have your words," Logan said of sexual violence.
"The physical wounds heal. You don't carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan."
Fager said the interview would be aired to break the "code of silence" surrounding the issue of sexual assault.
Logan said before the incident she had not been aware of the degree of harassment experienced by women in Egypt and elsewhere.
"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."
Logan told the Times that after the 60 Minutes segment is aired, she does not plan to give any more interviews about her experience.
"I don’t want this to define me," she said.
