New York:
Lara Logan, the CBS News correspondent, was attacked and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo on Feb. 11, the day that the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power, the network said Tuesday.
After the mob surrounded her, Ms. Logan "suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers," the network said in a statement. Ms. Logan is recovering at a hospital in the United States.
The evening of the attack, Ms. Logan, 39, the network's chief foreign affairs correspondent, was covering the celebrations in Tahrir Square in central Cairo with a camera crew and an unknown number of security staff members. The CBS team was enveloped by "a dangerous element" within the crowd, CBS said, that numbered more than 200 people. That mob separated Ms. Logan from her team and then attacked her.
Once she was rescued, CBS said she "reconnected" with the team and returned to the United States on Feb. 12.
The CBS statement mentioned nothing more about the attackers. It also said that there would be "no further comment from CBS News, and correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time."
Before she returned to Cairo on Feb. 10, she told the Web site of Esquire magazine that she thought her team included one security staff member. Equipped with expensive cameras and bright lights, television news crews regularly travel with security experts who assess threats in dangerous locations.
The trip was Ms. Logan's second to Egypt to cover the protests that have roiled the country in January and February. On her first trip, she was detained and interrogated overnight by security authorities.
During the protests, the Committee to Protect Journalists registered 53 assaults on journalists. It did not delineate the genders of the people affected. There were also dozens of cases of harassment during the weeks of protests, and some female journalists complained about being singled out by crowds. There were no other known sexual assaults.
The committee, whose board includes Ms. Logan, said Tuesday evening in a statement: "We have seen Lara's compassion at work while helping journalists who have faced brutal aggression while doing their jobs. She is a brilliant, courageous, and committed reporter. Our thoughts are with Lara as she recovers."
There is little information available about instances of sexual assault affecting journalists. In an article for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007, the writer, Judith Matloff, wrote that foreign correspondents rarely tell anyone, "even when the abuse is rape."