Journalists Recount Week of Fear in Iraq
April 2, 2003 10:48 AM EST 

Newsday photographer Moises Saman
sits in his hotel room in Amman, 
Jordan after arriving from Iraq along 
with Newsday  reporter Matthew
McAllester, Wednesday morning, 
April 2, 2003. The two were released
after being arrested by Iraqi authorities
in Baghdad.
(AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)		 AMMAN, Jordan - Four journalists held for a week in Iraq's most notorious prison and accused of being spies said Wednesday they feared they would be killed until the moment they were released. 

Newsday correspondent Matt McAllester, 33, and photographer Moises Saman, 29, were set free Tuesday along with Molly Bingham, a freelance photographer from Louisville, Ky., and a Danish freelance photographer, Johan Rydeng Spanner. 

Speaking to reporters in Amman, McAllester said he feared for his life "every second." 

"From the time we realized we were being taken to prison until the time we crossed the border into Jordan we felt our lives were in danger," he said. 

"We had no idea what they were going to do to us," Bingham said. "They kept blindfolding us and taking us away. Every day it was a question of, are they going to kill me or are they just going to ask me more questions?" 

The group had been held inside the Abu Ghraib prison since March 25, according to Charlotte Hall, Newsday's managing editor. An American peace activist, Philip Latasha, also was freed with the group, Hall said. 

Cheers broke out in the Newsday offices when word came that McAllester and Saman phoned the newspaper Tuesday to say they had been released, were crossing the Jordanian border and were in good health. 
The journalists said they were taken from their hotels, their rooms searched, and driven to the prison, the largest in the Arab world. At Abu Ghraib, they were separated and given prison clothes and two blankets. 

"Over the next few days they interrogated us over and over," Bingham said. "We had to sign papers." 

"They asked me a whole set of questions, about what kind of pictures I was taking, if I was involved with any kind of intelligence service, American or from any other countries, and basically just what was the purpose of me being in Baghdad at such a time," Saman said. 

Bingham said jets and B-52s could be heard overhead and bombs were landing all around. "We didn't know if anyone knew we were there so we didn't know if people were going to bomb us for military reasons." 

The journalists slept on the hard, cold concrete floor of 6-by-11 foot cells and were given three meals a day. 

"Breakfast was two hard-boiled eggs and chai. Lunch was rice and potatoes. Dinner was chicken broth and some sort of chicken and bread," Bingham said. 

"They, for the most part, treated us fairly and in a humane way," Saman said of the Iraqis. 

McAllester said they owed their release to the efforts of "hundreds of people we've never met. 

"Friends, famous people, our editors who stopped editing the paper. ... We owe them our freedom and maybe our lives," he said. 

A Palestinian lawmaker said Wednesday that Yasser Arafat helped win the release of the two Newsday journalists through his contacts in Iraq.