'They raped me with their hands' - CBS reporter Lara Logan breaks her silence on sex assault

US REPORTER Lara Logan has broken her silence on the sexual assault she suffered during the Egyptian uprising, saying she thought she was going to die.

Logan, 40, was in Cairo's Tahrir Square reporting for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes when she was encircled by a mob of two to three hundred men and attacked.

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying," she said in an interview with 60 Minutes that will air on Monday.

"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."

The South African-born Logan, one of the US media's most recognisable war correspondents, had been in the square interviewing Egyptians about the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak.
"There was a moment that everything went wrong," she told the New York Times in a separate interview.

As her cameraman was changing a battery, Egyptian members of her film crew heard people in the crowd talking about wanting to take Ms Logan's pants off.

"Our local people with us said, 'We've gotta get out of here'," Logan told the newspaper. "That was literally the moment the mob set on me."

"For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands."

After about half an hour, Logan was rescued by a group of Egyptian civilians and soldiers. She was flown back to the United States, where she spent four days in the hospital.

Logan told the Times that she decided almost immediately that she would talk about the incidence.

She said the assault had opened her eyes.

Before the incident, Logan said 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.