Blue Star Chronicles

Lynsey Addario is a New York Times photographer who was kidnapped along with three other NYT reporters on March 11, 2011. Photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, reporter and videographer Stephen Farrell, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid were dragged from their car by Libyan forces and held in captivity for six days. Today Lynsey Addario recounts what happened to them. Read about it below.

Lynsey Addario has opened up about her ordeal while in the captivity of Libyan forces. She was the only female reporter captured by the by pro-Gaddafi on March 11th and suffered repeated sexual assaults in addition to the threats of decapitation and beatings that her male companions suffered.

After she and her colleagues were hauled out of a car at a checkpoint near the eastern city of Ajdabiya, one of the Libyans punched her in the face and laughed at her.

‘Then I started crying and he was laughing more,’ she told the Times.

One man grabbed her breasts – the start of a pattern of sexual harassment she endured over the ensuing 48 hours.

‘There was a lot of groping,’ she said. ‘Every man who came in contact with us basically felt every inch of my body short of what was under my clothes.’

As she was being driven away from Ajdabiya, she said another of her captors stroked her head and told her repeatedly that she was going to be killed.

‘He was caressing my head in this sick way, this tender way, saying, “You’re going to die tonight. You’re going to die tonight”,‘ she added.

Miss Addario was with Anthony Shadid, the paper’s Beirut bureau chief, photographer Tyler Hicks and reporter and videographer Stephen Farrell when they were seized while leaving the scene of fighting between rebels and Libyan government forces because they decided it had become too dangerous.

Their driver inadvertently drove into a checkpoint manned by troops loyal to the Libyan dictator.

‘I was yelling to the driver, “Keep driving! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”,’ said Mr Hicks. ‘I knew that the consequences of being stopped would be very bad.’

As they were being forced out of their gold-coloured sedan, rebels opened fire sending them sprawling for safety.

‘You could see the bullets hitting the dirt,’ said Mr Shadid.

The soldiers forced them all to lie on the ground and they feared they were going to be murdered there and then.

‘I heard in Arabic, “Shoot them”,’ said Mr Shadid. ‘And we all thought it was over.’ But then they heard another soldier say: ‘No, they’re Americans. We can’t shoot them.’

The fate of the car driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is unknown.

The prisoners were tied up using wire, an electrical cord, a scarf and even a pair of laces and bundled into a car that drove them away from the city.

Each time they stopped at a checkpoint, soldiers would punch them or hit them with rifle butts, according to the Times report.

The first night they spent in the back of the vehicle and for the second they were put in a dirty cell with a bottle to urinate in and a jug of water to drink.

On the third day, they were blindfolded and put on a plane to Tripoli, where they were held in reasonable comfort in a safe house until their eventual release this morning.

After Libyan demands for a U.S. diplomat to be sent to Tripoli to collect the journalist was rebuffed, the Turkish Embassy was allowed to act as an intermediary.

Even then there was an agonizing last minute hitch when the planned release on Sunday was postponed because of the coalition bombing.

This sounds similar to the Lara Logan attack in Egypt except Logan wasn’t held for days.

When I look at the photo below I wonder how a war can be fought at all when there are more reporters and photographers taking pictures than there are fighters. Not to mention, they are giving the enemy a great view of whoever is shooting at them just by their presence and their flashing cameras.

Wouldn’t that be your judgment from this picture?

There are currently thirteen journalist missing and unaccounted for in Libya. The four American journalists who were released to Turkey yesterday are Photographers Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, reporter and videographer Stephen Farrell, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid. They are pictured below.