“60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent, was attacked and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo last Friday, the day the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power, the network said Tuesday. 

    WHEN war reporter Lara Logan’s co-workers learned that she had to be hospitalized after being attacked in Egypt, they knew it was serious.

    Logan, CBS’s chief foreign correspondent, is known as much for her toughness as for her good looks, so it was clear things were bad.

    “She’s not a wimpy, girly girl — she had a pocket for lipstick sewn into her flak jacket as a joke,” one source said.     

    Logan, 39, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling “Jew! Jew!” as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s main square last Friday, CBS and sources said Tuesday.

    The TV crew with Logan had its cameras rolling moments before she was dragged off — and caught her on tape looking tense and trying to head away from a crowd of men behind her in Tahrir Square.

    “Logan was covering the jubilation … when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration,” CBS said in a statement.

    “In the crush of the mob, [Logan] was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

    “She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning,” the network said.

    A network source said her attackers were screaming “Jew! Jew!” during the assault. And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of “being Israeli spies.” Logan is not Jewish.

    In last Friday’s attack, she was attacked for between 20 to 30 minutes, The Wall Street Journal said.

    Her injuries were described as “serious.” 

    CBS went public with the incident only after it became clear that other media outlets were on to it, sources said.

    “A call came in from The Associated Press” seeking information, a TV-industry source said. “They knew she had been attacked, and they had details. CBS decided to get in front of the story.”

    Most network higher-ups didn’t even know how brutal the sexual assault was until a few minutes before the statement went out.

    The horrific incident came a week after Logan was temporarily detained by Egyptian police amid tension over foreign coverage of the country’s growing revolution.

    Before the attack, Logan — who is based in Washington, where she lives with her 2-year-old daughter and husband — had been set to return to the United States sometime over the weekend to tape a “60 Minutes” segment on Wael Ghonim.

    Ghonim, Google’s head of marketing in the Middle East, had been briefly kidnapped after helping to organize protesters.

    But after she was assaulted, Logan went back to her hotel, and within two hours was flown out of Cairo on a chartered network jet, sources said.

    She wasn’t taken to a hospital in Egypt because the network didn’t trust local security there, sources said.

    Logan was discharged from an undisclosed hospital Tuesday. She has vowed to return to work “within weeks.”

    Logan has been candidly discussing what happened to her. “She is going to be OK,” a friend told TMZ.com.

    Friends said Logan was “unbelievably strong” and resting at her home.

    Riots, bloodshed and even physical attacks have been part of Logan’s job for years, and colleagues said she relishes her role as being a seasoned reporter in the world’s worst war-torn areas.

    When the South African native was embedded with a U.S. Army unit on the Afghan border shortly after 9/11, the armored Humvee she was traveling in was attacked by an anti-tank missile.

    The inside of Logan’s mouth was torn and her face left swollen and bruised. But when the Army tried to ship her home, she balked.

    “I was just enraged,” she told The Washington Post in a 2008 interview. “I’d already been blown up. I said, ‘I’ll just put an ice pack on.’ There was no way I was going to leave, no way in hell.”

    The beautiful war correspondent started her journalism career early on, pushing for and landing a job at the Sunday Tribune in Durban, South Africa, while in high school.

    Soon after, she went to New York, working as a hostess at the Water Club on the East River in Manhattan.

    When she decided to get serious about reporting again, she returned to South Africa, went to college, took modeling jobs to earn extra cash, and quickly landed a job with a local TV news service.

    From there, she launched her international career, traveling throughout the Middle East on stringer gigs with CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN.

    It was a CBS Radio freelance job that finally helped her land a coveted correspondent’s position on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

    She once told The New York Times she was well aware of the risks in her job.

    But “I think you’re not really thinking about being afraid,” she said.

    “For me, I’m just so happy to be there, in that situation. It’s so fascinating. You get a view of life that you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

    But her stellar rise came with a heavy personal cost at times, she said.

    While covering Baghdad in the mid-2000s, her six-year marriage to former professional basketballer Jason Siemon fell apart, she said.

    And there was an infamous incident in 2008 in Iraq involving her relationship with a then-still-married U.S. contractor, Joseph Burkett.

    Burkett allegedly brawled with one of Logan’s exes, CNN correspondent Michael Ware, in a Baghdad “safehouse,” and in the ensuing headlines, it was later revealed that Logan was pregnant with Burkett’s child. Logan and Burkett are now married and have two children. (SD-Agencies)