War reporter Lara Logan said she thought she would die a “torturous death” during a sexual assault and beating she suffered in Egypt, fearing that she was “in the process of dying” at the hands of the angry mob, she revealed in two interviews made public today.

In her first interview since the Feb. 11 attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Logan told CBS’s “60 Minutes” as she recalled the harrowing experience.

While Egyptians celebrated in the streets at the news that President Hosni Mubarak had stepped down after 30 years of rule, Logan said she reported without incident for nearly an hour before her interpreter heard words in the Arabic-speaking crowd that gave him pause.

He advised Logan and her team to leave, but before they could, a mob of several hundred men encircled her.

In a separate interview with The New York Times, Logan told the newspaper that she was interviewing Egyptians when the situation got scary.

“There was a moment that everything went wrong,” she recalled.

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Logan’s pants off.

“Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me,” she told the newspaper.

That’s when Logan said that she became separated from her team and bodyguard for 25 minutes as the crowd — which included some 300 men — swept her up.

It was during those 25 minutes that Logan said she was beaten and sexually assaulted.

“There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying,” she said in an interview that will air on Sunday night. “I thought not only am I going to die, but it’s going to be just a torturous death that’s going to go on forever.”

In excerpts posted on CBS’s website today, Logan said that the thought of her two young children helped reinforce her determination to survive.

Logan said Egyptian soldiers drove her and her team back to their hotel, where she was examined by a doctor. She returned to the US the following day and taken to a hospital, where she was treated for four days.

When Logan saw her children, she said she “felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn’t deserve … because I did that to them. I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them.”

Logan, who began her first full day back in her “60 Minutes” office earlier this week, said she is healing.

“I am so much stronger,” she said.

With AP