Video of Libyan Woman Dragged Away From Foreign Press Corps

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and ROBERT MACKEY

As our colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, “A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.”

Here is raw video of the incident, posted online by Britain’s Channel 4 News, whose correspondent, Jonathan Miller, was also among the reporters trying to hear the woman’s story:

Mr. Miller reported: “I personally saw a waiter and a waitress raise a knife to try to stop this woman talking.” Later he told The Guardian: “There was a desperate sense of our failure to prevent the thugs taking her away…. There was nothing more that we could have done as we were overtly threatened by considerable physical force.”

Here is more video of the incident from the Reuters crew in the hotel posted online by The Telegraph:

Last week, our colleague, Mr. Kirkpatrick, described in detail the “surreal semi-imprisonment” of life in the Hotel Rixos for the 100-plus foreign journalists who were invited to the Libyan capital by the Qaddafi government, and forced to work under tight restrictions, after demonstrations in Tripoli were suppressed.

Today Mr. Kikpatrick sent us these additional details about the Libyan woman’s attempt to tell her story to the journalists in the hotel:

She turned up at the front desk of our hotel asking specifically for Reuters and the New York Times. Moises Saman, the photographer working for the Times here, ran to get me and his camera. By the time I got to the dining room, Michael Georgy of Reuters had managed to have a brief conversation with her.

Charles Clover of the Financial Times — a pretty big and young guy, physically, with the build a college rugby player — was attempting to put himself between her and the security forces trying to drag her away. At one point, a security guard wrestled with Clover for the iPhone he had used to record a conversation with her — it was thrown to the floor, and Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times grabbed it to put in the safe keeping of a beefy BBC security guy. The CNN security guy was struggling to hold a camera or microphone that the Libyan government or hotel security were trying to snatch.

The government security officials got her out a back door into the garden and pulled the shades so we couldn’t see. So I and some others ran around to get another view, to keep an eye on her. A woman who had seemed like some kind of a hotel manager was stroking her hair and helping her with her scarf and trying to calm the woman down down out in the garden. But she did not want to go quietly. She spoke mainly Arabic, but at one point she tried to shout to us in English, “15 men slept with me.” Arabic speakers around me said she had said it more directly in Arabic: “15 men raped me.”

After she was gone, we collectively picked Nic Robertson of CNN — a very even-tempered and responsible correspondent who I know that the Libyans respect — to ask on behalf of the press that we be allowed to see her again to know that she was safe. I went with him. The government press officials said they did not know who took her, ask the hotel staff. The hotel staff said they did not know either. After some more run around and a shouting match at a press conference with the deputy foreign minister, Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said he had talked to the police officers who had her in custody. Although he had questioned her testimony before, he said that it now appeared to be a rape case — a standard criminal case under investigation. And he assured us that he would try to find a way to update us on her status.

We are not her lawyers, as the deputy foreign minister reminded me. And we are not human rights workers. And our Libyan hosts ask whether we also feel as moved to sympathy at the plight of Libyans killed by allied air strikes. We do, of course, whether they are civilians or not.

It was clear this woman was in obvious agony. She was seeking sanctuary. And to tell her story she asked for our newspaper.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/