“WE KILL, we kill,” muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq.
During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea of their whereabouts, the terrified quintet sat in adjacent, bare-concrete cells forbidden to talk to each other, their solitude punctuated by the screams of Iraqi prisoners being led away to torture from the cells around them, the thud of anti-aircraft fire and the pounding of US bombs that were exploding uncomfortably close.
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