Paris (dpa) – Edith Bouvier, the injured French journalist who was trapped in Syria for nine days, related her dramatic escape from the besieged city of Homs in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper Saturday. The 31-year-old paid tribute to the rebels who shepherded her to safety, saying: “They really put themselves in danger for us. They did everything for us.” Bouvier, a freelance reporter for Le Figaro, and William Daniels, 34, the photographer with whom she was working, returned to Paris Friday aboard a government jet sent to fetch them from Lebanon. The fate of the young reporter, who suffered a broken leg during an attack on Homs last week that killed an American and a French reporter, had gripped France over the past week. She had last been seen in an online video message from a makeshift rebel-run hospital in the dissident Baba Amr district of Homs appealing for an evacuation. A first attempt to smuggle her, and scores of other injured Homs residents, out of the city through an underground tunnel, had failed. A British and a Spanish journalist managed to reach safety. Bouvier told Le Figaro how, strapped with adhesive tape to a stretcher, she was being carried through the three-kilometer-long pitch- black tunnel by rebels from the Free Syrian Army when the tunnel was shelled by government forces. Bouvier and Daniels were forced to beat a retreat on the back of a motorbike, Bouvier's broken leg folded in such a way that she could fit in the saddle. After an operation to repair the further damage to her leg, the rebels proposed to try evacuate them by car to Lebanon, using secret routes to dodge army checkpoints and a succession of vehicles and safe houses. The stop-start journey, along mountain roads, through snow and freezing rain, took four days. Reflecting on the attack on February 22 that killed Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik in Baba Amr, Bouvier and Daniels said they felt they were “directly targeted.” The reporters were killed in a barrage of rockets that appeared aimed at the makeshift media centre where they were working. Bouvier said the shelling of Baba Amr was relentless each day, with only a short let-up when the soldiers manning the guns broke for lunch. “When the bombs fell, people would say: Bashar is saying ‘hello',” she said. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/zMyb6 Tags: Bouvier, Journalist, Syria, Violence Section: Europe, Latest News, Media, Syria
