CNN
UK journalist assaulted in Tahrir Square: 'Please make it stop'
>From Dan Rivers, CNN
June 28, 2012 -- Updated 2153 GMT (0553 HKT)
CNN.com
Cairo (CNN) -- Amid the celebrations that greeted the declaration of a winner
in Egypt's first freely elected presidential vote, a British student journalist
was being sexually assaulted by a mob in Tahrir Square.
Natasha Smith recounted the experience on her blog and in an interview with
CNN. Smith, who has since left Egypt, wrote that the moving demonstrations of
freedom turned to horror "in a split second" when dozens of frenzied men
dragged her away from two male companions and began to grope her "with
increasing force and aggression."
"Men started ripping off all my clothes," she told CNN. "First of all, it was
my skirt, and that just went straight away, and I didn't even feel my underwear
being removed. Then my shoes went and clothes on my upper half were just being
ripped off me, and that was quite painful."
During the assault, "I was just in this weird, detached state of mind, and I
just kept saying, 'Please God, please make it stop. Please, God, make it stop.'
"
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Her experience echoes the assaults faced by two prominent female reporters, CBS
News correspondent Lara Logan and Egyptian-American columnist Mona Eltahawy,
who has said her attackers were officers at a police station. One of Smith's
friends, Callum Paton, told CNN the mob dragged Smith naked across the ground
before another group of men stepped in to protect her.
Read Natasha Smith's account.
"There were several moments at which I thought she was going to die," Paton
said. "And I think that really the fact that we are still alive, and especially
Natasha's still alive, was because there were so many people who were willing
to help us and were willing to risk their own lives and put them in direct
danger to get her out of that situation."
Smith was on her first international assignment, shooting a documentary on
women's rights in Egypt as her final college project. A doctor who treated
Smith and a British Embassy official who met her at the hospital corroborrated
her account for CNN.
"If there hadn't been a small group of men around me, I would have been raped
and killed," she said. "That's just without question, because that's what the
men were trying to do. It was very clear what they were trying to do to me.
They weren't just trying to play around with me, they were gunning for me for
whatever reason."
On her blog, she wrote that an ambulance pulled up at one point, but it was
forced to leave when it "was invaded by tens of men." Even after being escorted
to a medical tent by volunteers who formed a cordon around her, her attackers
surrounded the tent. Women who assisted her told her the attack "was motivated
by rumors spread by troublemaking thugs that I was a foreign spy, following a
national advertising campaign warning of the dangers of foreigners."
"Arab women, Muslim women were all around me, just crying, saying 'This is not
Egypt! This is not Egypt! This is not Islam! These are thugs!' " she told CNN.
She said she responded, "I know, I love Egypt, I know this is not Islam, it's
OK.
"And they were stunned, 'cause they thought I was going to be so full of hate
and so full of fear. But from the very beginning, I don't blame Egypt for this.
This is not the workings of the Egyptian people. This is not representative."
To escape, she said, "I was told I had to put my trust in this Egyptian man. I
was disguised in a burqa and let out of this tent with this man, barefoot and I
had to pretend to be his wife and walk through the streets and he kept just
saying to me, 'Don't cry. Do not cry. If you cry, people will know.' "
On her blog, she complained about her treatment at the hospital, noting that
the doctor's first question was whether she was married, "which is of course
the most important question to be asking a victim of mass sexual abuse."
"He and a female nurse (who only reluctantly kept me covered up) looked briefly
at the damage and just wandered off, saying that because I didn't have internal
bleeding, they couldn't do anything," she wrote. "A useful trip, that was."
But the doctor, Mohammed Meligi, said Smith's account may be "a
misunderstanding, because she was here first time to enter the Egyptian
hospital."
Smith said her case will get attention "because I'm British and I'm young and
I'm a girl," but she said other Egyptian women "will often suffer these attacks
and worse attacks and there'll be no justice done."
"There's been an outpouring of support, and I'm so grateful for that," she
said. But she said she wished that support could be shared with "all women, of
all nationalities, wherever they are."
"I'll be so happy if this could make any difference to other women who are in
this situation, not just in Egypt, not just in the Middle East, but
everywhere," she said.
CNN's Jonathan Wald in London contributed to this report.
7
© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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