FRANCE: Florence Aubenas, the French journalist who was freed at the weekend after 157 days as a hostage in Iraq, was held in a pitch-black underground cell with a ceiling so low she could not stand up.
With her hands and feet tied, blindfold, Aubenas was forbidden from speaking or moving from the foam mattress she lay on. She was allowed to shower once a month and lost 12 kilos on a diet of one hard-boiled egg and a piece of bread in the morning and a small plate of rice in the afternoon.
Yet through more than five months of captivity, Aubenas told a press conference here yesterday, she never despaired. "I knew France never drops its hostages," she said.
For 1½ hours she recounted her story with the lucidity, attention to detail and sense of humour that have characterised her reporting for Libération newspaper for the past 19 years.
"It starts on January 5th," Aubenas began. "With Hussein, we decided to do a story about Falluja, which was destroyed last November." Hussein Hanoun is Libération's "fixer" - guide, interpreter and driver - in Iraq.
The two spent the day in a tent city of refugees from Falluja, on a university campus in Baghdad. The Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena was later kidnapped leaving the same refugee camp.
Four gunmen followed the journalists' car when they left the camp. Aubenas called her newspaper, but it was lunchtime in Paris and the switchboard didn't answer. The gunmen claimed they suspected Hanoun of stealing money, that it would take only an hour or two to sort out. "I knew immediately we were hostages," Aubenas said.
In the first villa they were taken to, Aubenas and Hanoun were blindfolded and bound. "Tell him goodbye," the kidnappers ordered Aubenas. In the second house she was told to put on a tracksuit with "Titanic" on the sweat-shirt, taken downstairs to a basement cell and dumped on a mattress.
The cell was four metres long, two metres wide and 1.5 metres high. The only glimmer of light was through an air vent, the only sound the dripping of water from a rusty pipe.
Aubenas's own newspaper reported that in addition to Florence and Hussein "three Romanians, their Iraqi-American guide and several other hostages of different nationalities" were held in the same cell. But Aubenas refused to discuss other hostages, apparently to protect those she left behind.
"We're talking about cellars, bound hands and feet."
Three days after her kidnapping, Aubenas was taken from the cell and questioned about the role of France in the 1954-1962 Algerian war, Palestine and the US presence in Iraq.
When a new voice joined in, Aubenas asked who he was and was told: "The boss". Later he was called "the Haji", the honorific title for a Muslim who has been to Mecca.
"What were you doing here?" he asked. She explained that Libération had sent her to cover Iraq's parliamentary elections. "They send a woman to a country like Iraq to write about politics?" he said. "You're a spy!"
Five months in a cellar was "very long to live through and very short to recount," Aubenas said. "It's 24 steps to and from the toilet twice a day, 80 words exchanged with the guards. I was sick one day in two.
"They asked me where it hurt and I answered by putting my hand on my stomach or head. If it was the stomach, they held out two envelopes and said: 'Stop or go?'. If it was the head, they held out one envelope and said: 'Valium'."
A man was brought into the cell and put on a mattress 90cm from Aubenas. "They said, 'If you talk to him you'll be punished'." On January 17th guards burst into the cell, falsely accused the two of talking, then took both out and beat them.
"They knew we hadn't spoken. It was a way of intimidating us. When he cried too loudly, they told him he'd be punished."
One week before they were freed, Aubenas learned that the man beside her was her "fixer", Hanoun.
When her captors forced Aubenas to record a video, she persuaded them not to make a "pistol-at-the-temple-three-days-or-we-kill-her ultimatum". She asked what group they were with. They replied only: "We are mujahideen and we are fighting the Americans in Iraq." On one occasion the "Haji" said she looked unwell and gave her a packet of crisps.
When the kidnappers asked Aubenas for President Jacques Chirac's e-mail address, and whether there was an opposition party in France, "I told myself this could take five years."
They were aware of failed attempts by the French deputy Didier Julia to obtain the release of two French hostages last year. Reasoning that he would want to redeem himself, they made Aubenas appeal for Julia's help.
Aubenas was forced to re-record the video until she cried to the kidnappers' satisfaction. When it was shown on satellite television, they were so pleased that they untied her and gave her a 10-volume Koran which she could not read blindfolded in the dark cell.
Last Saturday morning Aubenas and Hanoun were told: "Today. Paris." They were given new clothes, and their personal belongings, stored in plastic bags, were handed back to them. For the first time in 157 days, they were given chairs to sit on, served tea and roast chicken. They had become guests. Aubenas's guards gave her two rings and a bottle of perfume as farewell presents.
An Iraqi journalist at yesterday's press conference asked Aubenas to forgive her country.
The newly freed hostage told the story of a woman whose daughter was murdered by the Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux.
"I was against the death penalty before. Why should I be for it now?" the woman told Aubenas.
"Iraq, it's the same thing," Aubenas continued. "I liked Iraq before. I still like Iraq.
"The most difficult thing is to break the cycle of waiting. You wait for the trips to the toilet. You wait for the food. But the food is always bad and never enough. To stop waiting, you invent stories, you create new friends in your head."
Aubenas has no strategy to return to a normal life. "My life has not been broken into pieces like Hussein's. All of my friendship and solidarity go towards him," she said.