When Liz Hayes and the 60 Minutes team headed to Sweden to report on the Western European refugee crisis, they never imagined they would be attacked and become the story.

AS THE attackers surrounded the 60 Minutes crew and the punches began flying on a Stockholm street, tough-as-nails reporter Liz Hayes remembers thinking she was glad she was a woman.

“I just knew, they wouldn’t hit me,” says Hayes of the moment she and her crew became the unwilling centre of a story on the refugee crisis, which they had travelled to Europe to report on.

“I was glad, right then, that I was a woman. I felt they wouldn’t hit me because of that, and that might mean I could slow things down a bit.”

“I’m pretty sure if I was one of the guys I probably would have been hit as well.”

Hayes is an old school journalist who across more than two decades of reporting with 60 Minutes has always been a believer in delivering the story, not being the story.

But as a report airing on 60 Minutes on Sunday night shows, in Stockholm in late January, the story walked up and hit the news team squarely in the face.

Hayes has reported from the frontline in Afghanistan and is no stranger to danger — but admits she didn’t see the attack — which saw a cameraman’s foot run over by a car, and the rest of the crew punched and kicked, coming.

“It was Sweden. I wasn’t expecting hairy, but I think it all comes back to tensions and issues between migrants, immigrants and refugees and just the general friction that is occurring around the world,” she says.

“It was pretty confronting, because I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“But it can be explained in the context of friction between cultures that is going on over there.

“People are in need and desperate, and when you open your doors it doesn’t always mean everyone is going to live happily ever after.”

With hindsight, the writing was on the wall from the minute the crew arrived in Rinkebury in Stockholm — where 90 per cent of the residents come from an immigrant background — to a hostile reception.

“We opened the door and some young guys saw we had camera equipment. One put his head in the car — I hadn’t even got out of my seat — and started abusing us and telling us we should leave,” Hayes says.

“We got out and that’s when our cameraman got run over by a car — a very deliberate act.

“We called the police, they arrived quickly, we chatted with them and the cameraman said he felt OK. In hindsight he was injured more than he thought, but adrenaline is such that he didn’t register anything at the time.”

Things had settled, the police said they would stay on the periphery, and the crew decided to continue filming.

“There were lots of very nice people, very friendly people — I didn’t feel worried,” Hayes says.

But it was far from over.

The crew had almost finished filming when the mood changed.

“I think the crowd that were in the car must have returned with masks on, and then it turned fairly ugly,” Hayes says. “It came from nowhere and it escalated very quickly.”

The footage shows the crew being surrounded by men, and the punches beginning.

There is a series of scuffles. A man in a black jacket, face partially concealed, rains blows down as Hayes appeals for calm.

“Hey, hey, hey,” she says, raising her hands, trying to defuse the situation, moving into the group.

All Hayes was thinking at that point was they needed to get out, and maybe she could buy some time.

“I took a chance that they wouldn’t hit me, and they didn’t,” she said.

“I felt confident they couldn’t bring themselves to hit a woman, so I could potentially just slow things up a bit so we could get out.”

“I thought I could stall them because I was a female, I felt I could get in the middle — but I also knew I could only do that for a minute.”

As the crowd turned on itself, Hayes and the crew made their escape.

Hayes says the experience drives home that tensions are at breaking point in a country gripped by serious security issues in the wake of a refugee crisis which has seen the largest movement of people since World War II.

Millions have fled Middle Eastern trouble spots seeking sanctuary in Western Europe.

Sweden has embraced hundreds of thousands of the refugees, and, arguably become a victim of its own generosity.

“It’s just part and parcel of the difficult refugee scenario, and it’s a shame because I think 99 per cent of people who are fleeing are not necessarily a threat and not necessarily poorly behaved,” Hayes says.

“For another part of the story I had been on a boat retrieving refugees out of the sea — women and children — and I didn’t at all feel that those people had come for trouble. They had come to save their lives.”

60 Minutes airs at 7pm Sunday on Channel 9