“None of us thought we were going to live”: kidnapped NYT journos

Four New York Times journalists were kidnapped and held for six days while on assignment in Libya. The paper has published a story all four — Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks — wrote about their harrowing experience.

The four had already covered “the fall of two other rebel-held towns.” They’d entered Libya without visas. “No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we,” they write. They were stopped at a checkpoint of Qaddafi’s soldiers.

“…a soldier flung open his door. ‘Journalists!’ he yelled at the other soldiers, their faces contorted in fear and rage. It was too late.”

“Tyler’s hands were bound by a strip of a scarf. A soldier took off Lynsey’s gray Nike shoes, then bound her with the shoelaces. “God, I just don’t want to be raped,” she whispered to Steve.

“None of us thought we were going to live.”

One of them saw a body, and the four worry that it was their driver, who has not been found.

“If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for. No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.”

On top of that, upon their eventual release, “Weighing over all of us was guilt for what we had put our families and friends through.”