IN MY SHOES: I Was Within Minutes Of Being Killed In Cairo's Tahrir Square
FOX News correspondent Greg Palkot tells GQ about his harrowing ordeal after he and his cameraman Olaf Wiig got caught up in the mayhem at Tahrir Square as pro-Mubarak and anti-Mubarak groups clashed violently and beaten within an inch of their lives:
We went in just as the pro-Mubarak protestors started entering the square. We started following along with them to see what was going to happen. … There was no violence initially but then things kicked off pretty much as soon as the two sides met. …
We were foreigners and they were just rabid for anything and so they were pummeling us and hitting us and using sticks and fists and using open hands and using rocks, primarily in the head but all over the body too. While this was all going on, we were moving forward because in theory the hotel, our goal, was at best a half-mile away or less than that. But there was about 5,000 pro-Mubarak protestors between us and our goal.
All the foreign media and human-rights workers were targeted and that was clearly part of the game plan of the government side, to blame foreigners for creating the problem, which was clearly not the case. …
You're fending off the blows, you're trying to figure out if somebody's a friend of yours when they're looking at you, and then the next minute they're smashing you in the face. …
I guess it varies from crowd to crowd, but with our crowd it probably would have taken 15 minutes to kill us, and we were at minute 12 in that 15-minute process. We were that close.
Palkot says that when he and Wiig were taken from the hospital to the headquarters of the secret police for “processing” before their release, “I realized instantly that we were back in the hands of the enemy.”
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