American media crew carjacked, threatened with beheading in Egypt
By ANIFriday, February 4, 2011
CAIRO - A group of angry Egyptian men carjacked an ABC News crew and threatened to behead them in the latest and most menacing attack on foreign reporters trying to cover the anti-government protest in the country.
ABC News producer Brian Hartman said that he along with cameraman Akram Abi-hanna and two other employees were surrounded on a crowded road in Cairo.
“Just escaped after being carjacked at a checkpoint and driven to a compound where men surrounded the car and threatened to behead us,” ABC News quoted Hartman’s Twitter post, as saying.
“The men released us only after our cameraman appealed to the generous spirit of the Egyptian people, hugging and kissing an elder,” he added in a subsequent tweet.
Foreign journalists have increasingly become targets of the attacks in Cairo, as over 100 reporters have been menaced, forced off the road, shoved against fences, and physically assaulted.
A Greek reporter was stabbed in the leg.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has condemned the “systematic targeting” of journalists in Egypt, and the US State Department described it as a “concerted campaign to intimidate”. (ANI)
