Barbara Walters talks with Molly Bingham, a photojournalist recently released from an Iraqi prison.

April 4, 2003 -- When Molly Bingham was blindfolded and taken from her cell in an Iraqi prison, she feared the worst.

"I was blindfolded and taken out for, for my questioning," the freelance photojournalist told ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters in an interview airing on 20/20.

She feared she would be tortured or even killed.

"I thought maybe that first night … that they were taking me out and they were going to get me to kneel and, and kill me, and, and I didn't know."

Bingham, 34, and three other Western journalists were released this week by their Iraqi captors and dropped at the Iraqi-Jordanian border. They made their way to Amman, the Jordanian capital, and were able to contact their families and employers. They had survived a harrowing ordeal that began 11 days ago — when they were taken at gunpoint from their Baghdad hotel.

Taken From Her Hotel by Armed Men

Bingham arrived in Iraq on assignment for the World Picture News Photo Agency a few days before coalition bombs started falling. She entered the country on a tourist visa — not as an accredited journalist. This may have caused suspicion among the Iraqi officials.

For Bingham, journalism is a family tradition. Her father was a prominent newspaper publisher in the Midwest. She grew up in a suburb of Louisville, Ky., a privileged world far removed from the hard realities of war.

She first experienced war when she was 25 years old, when she went to Rwanda to document refugees fleeing from a vicious civil conflict. Her photo essays illustrate human suffering — a funeral in Gaza, the drug trade in Iran, the recent war in Afghanistan. Bingham was the official photographer on Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

So it was no surprise that she chose to go to Iraq. Like many other Western journalists, she was staying in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Her ordeal began there, she said, when she was confronted by six armed men.

Bingham said a man in a military uniform said, "You're going to come with us. … We're going to take you for a few hours to a very safe place and you'll be back tomorrow morning."

Bingham told the men she didn't want to leave the hotel, but, she said, they made it clear that she had no choice.

Also taken were photographer Moises Saman and reporter Matthew McAllester, who work for the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, and Danish photojournalist Johann Spanner.

Interrogated in Prison

Bingham said the armed men took her to a car, and one of them told her, "We're taking you to a very, very safe place and, uh, and, we'll have a surprise for you. Maybe a good surprise, maybe a bad surprise. I don't know."

They drove for about 40 minutes, Bingham said, before they arrived at what she soon realized was a prison.

She quickly learned that she and the three other journalists had been locked up in the most dreaded place in all of Baghdad — the Abu Ghraib Prison, the largest prison in the Arab world.

Bingham said she was frightened and began to fear that she would be tortured or killed — especially when she was blindfolded and taken from her cell.

Instead, she was taken to a room, her blindfold was removed, and her captors began to question her. Bingham said they accused her of being a spy, and wanted to know about her connections to the CIA and the Pentagon.

The conditions in the prison, Bingham said, were grim, but not inhumane. She was held in a cell that was about 12 feet by 6 feet, with a concrete floor. She said it was quite cold at night. Her one small comfort came from looking out her cell window at a ficus tree.

"I thought, 'Oh, this is my little tree,' " she said. "I could just sort of see my little tree and sort of think there was a world outside, um, that was going on and believing that people were doing everything that they possibly could to make sure that we'd be released."

She added, "They treated us humanely in that we were fed and we were allowed to go to the toilet, … I was allowed to bathe."

Those were the extent of the comforts. The journalists were not allowed to talk to the Red Cross, to call any officials, or to talk to their families.

"I was not allowed to talk to anyone in the prison other than my interrogators, not even my colleagues who were there with me," Bingham said.

Fearing that other prisoners would tell the guards if she and her colleagues talked to each other from their cells, they kept silent.

Sounds of Torture

But they were not surrounded by silence. Bingham said she heard screams from prisoners "who were being abused or screaming for some reason. I couldn't see, so I don't know why."

She described a frightening night in which she heard screams from a prisoner on her cell block. "There was this scuffling and ruckus and they came sort of running down our hall yelling and screaming in Arabic and very aggressively, and you could hear them, you know, beating, beating somebody."

She said she heard someone come in and stop the beating, but the prisoner continued whimpering for an hour or more. "I didn't see who it was when they were beating him, I didn't want to look, I didn't want to see." The next day, Bingham said, she saw a man — she thinks he was an Iraqi — with bloodied feet who was in bad shape.

Bingham said she endured her captivity on a moment-to-moment basis. Her thoughts alternated, she said, between fearing that they would rape, torture or kill her and faith in the fact that they were treating her and the other journalists fairly well.

Another frightening aspect of Bingham's captivity came from the daily sounds of fighter jets flying directly over the compound. "You could hear them fly over and then several minutes later you would hear two explosions and then they'd come back," she said.

On her seventh day of captivity, Bingham said, her interrogators returned.

"They came to my cell first, which seemed to be their habit, and they blindfolded me again," she said. She said one of the interrogators toyed with her by saying, "The judge has made a decision. You kill."

She said she realized he was just joking, and he then told her, "We will give you your things. It's time for you to go."

The ordeal was over. Iraqi officials never explained why they arrested the group or why they were freed.

Despite her terrifying experience, Bingham said she has no intention of taking up a less risky line of work. Her dad, after learning of her release, said he hopes she'll take up fashion photography.

Laughing, Bingham said, "I don't think I'm particularly good at that, so I think I'll try to stick to the things I know how to do well."