I found this post by blogger Témoris Grecko who claims to have witnessed the events in Tahir Square (H/T AshCairo on Reddit). I obviously can’t vouch for his credibility, but it does strike me as far more credible than the mainstream news reports.
I witnessed part of the mob attack against CBS’s Lara Logan at Cairo’s Tahrir square on the evening of Friday, February 11th. I was struck when I read CBS’s February 15th communiqué describing the attack as a “brutal and sustained sexual attack”, and attributing her rescue to “a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.” This account does not fit with what I, and others, witnessed.
A bit later he elaborates:
I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”
I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it. There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and dissapeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.
Later I spoke with two young male activists who helped the person I later learned was Lara Logan (I didn’t know her before, I don’t usually follow US networks). They were Omar El Shennawy, a 21 year old teacher of English, and Abdulrahman Elsayed, a 25 year old teacher of physical education. They said they had formed a human chain with other young men to protect Logan, and then delivered her to the Egyptian Museum military post.
When I read CBS’s story and it’s interpretation by other media outlets, I felt troubled. It seemed misleading. “It didn’t make sense to me”, said Benjamin Starr, from Boston who arrived as a tourist on January 24th, and stayed to witness the uprising. He also saw the mob pass by with Lara Logan. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe something happened in another part of the square, but from what I saw, she was being taken by men to the soldiers, and her clothes were not torn off. There were no women, I didn’t see a single woman in the crowd around her.”
His full post is worth a read if nothing else.
Update: Témoris Grecko has posted a response to Lara Logan’s interview on 60 Minutes.
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