Horrific

I knew Lara Logan during my time at CBS News, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more tenacious, eager, committed reporter. She was someone who could have gotten by on just her looks, but didn’t.  She rolled up her sleeves and went into some of the most dangerous places on earth, to get the story, because that’s what mattered.

So this news is more than a shock.  It’s just horrific:

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

The New York Daily News spotlights her fearlessness:

Logan and her crew had been detained at gunpoint by security forces on Feb. 2, the same day that many journalists were beaten or kidnapped.

She was kicked out of the country and came back to New York, where she told the Charlie Rose Show last Monday that she wanted desperately to go back.

“It’s very hard for me to be away from this story,” she said. “I feel, in one sense, like a failure professionally. I feel like I failed because I didn’t deliver, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

“Fundamentally it’s in my blood to be there and to be on the street and listening to people and to do the best reporting that I can.”

She acknowledged that “I put my family through a difficult situation” but said she felt worse for the Egyptians left behind in the interrogation cells.

“In the end foreign journalists have somewhere to go. They have a safe place to go, but these people don’t,” Logan told Rose.