On the 20 February, on this blog, BBC World News Editor Jon Williams wrote: "Reporting from Libya is tricky at the best of times - clearly, the situation there right now is anything but."

Feras Killani (L) and Goktay Koraltan

Never a truer word spoken. Nevertheless, the BBC deployed on the ground in Tripoli and the "liberated" areas, as well as at the borders with Egypt and Tunisia. Our reporters are working hard for our domestic and global audiences to make sense of a complex and fragmented story that came hard on the heels of Tunisia and Egypt and yet is so radically different.

The BBC's news gathering operation is flawlessly run. Nothing is ever left to chance. All our reporters and correspondents go through a strict and robust safety training, equipped to deal with the most unpredictable of situations. So, with our BBC Arabic team working with their English colleagues in Tripoli and elsewhere under the watchful eye of our Middle East bureau chief Paul Danahar, I was confident everything was taken care of.

But it would be untrue to say that I didn't expect "the call", the editor's nightmare come true. And "the call" did come.

Paul rang London to say our BBC Arabic team in Tripoli had been detained by pro-Gaddafi forces. Feras Killani, Goktay Koraltan, and Chris Cobb-Smith had been arrested at a military checkpoint outside the city of Zawiya.

Now that they've told their story and are safely out of Libya, we know that they were then taken to a massive military compound in Tripoli where they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten. And we know that for 21 hours they were subjected to physical violence and psychological terror at the hands of Colonel Gaddafi's security forces.

They were kicked around, threatened with death, hooded and blindfolded, left in a cage and subjected to mock executions.

Feras, a correspondent of Palestinian descent, was singled out for special treatment.

"[They] took me out to the car park behind the guard room. Then [they] started hitting me without saying anything. First with fist, then boots, then knees. Then [they] found a plastic pipe on the ground and beat me with that. Then one of the soldiers gave them a long stick ..."

It continued later, only this time it was even worse:

"I was on the floor on my side, hands and feet cuffed, lying half on a mattress, and they were beating me... They were saying I'm a spy working for British intelligence."

You could argue this is pretty terrible but after all nothing new; journalists around the world face this kind of violence every day in the course of their work. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 850 reporters killed since 1992. The BBC World service lost two journalists over a 48-hour period in June 2008, when Samad Rohani of the Afghan Service and Nasteh Dahir of the Somali Service were killed in their respective countries. And of course we all recall the four-month ordeal of Alan Johnston, kidnapped and held by militants in Gaza.

But this is not just a story about journalists and the dangers they face in doing their jobs. This is a story about torture and hidden victims, and what happens when there is no one to tell it and lift the veil.

When Feras, Gotkan and Chris were put in a metal cage, they could hear the screams of people being tortured. Soon those people were brought into the cage, men and women, Libyans and non Libyans, some in a terrible state. Their story has to be told.

As he was being beaten, Feras was told by the Libyans that they didn't like his reports. He was being punished for the content of his journalism - that he, like every single one of our journalists, works hard at ensuring impartiality, that he reports in Arabic, on a BBC channel available in Libya, in a language understood by those meeting out the beatings, only made matters worse for him.

Our journalists are tested every day and Libya is but the latest in a series of conflicts they're covering. Some like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, are among the toughest stories to report. Yet when tensions run high and violence becomes the norm, we need to be there, with the insightful, in-depth coverage that only being on the ground can yield.

Liliane Landor is languages controller of BBC Global News

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Can you train an Afghan army recruit, in eight short weeks, to play an effective role fighting the Taliban insurgency?

The success of US and UK strategy in Afghanistan hinges on the answer to this because that strategy involves training and equipping the Afghan National Army to play an ever greater role, so international combat troops can eventually leave.

We wanted to find out what this training process is actually like for the raw recruits entering the Afghan armed forces.

From initial concept to finished product

With the help of the BBC Persian and Newsgathering teams in Kabul we decided to follow four young men through the eight weeks of basic training they receive before being deployed.

It took Kabul producer Bilal Sarwary weeks of negotiation with the Afghan authorities to get permission to film and spend time with the recruits, accompanied by BBC Persian reporter Daud Qarizadah and cameraman Abdul Hameed Karimi.

The Afghan army told us no other foreign media organisation had been given such a close-up look at the training facilities or process.

A Taliban attack right at the start of our reporters' assignment highlighted the dangers the recruits face just by wearing their country's uniform. The militants are doing their best to dissuade young Afghans from joining the military.

On the Sunday morning when our team was due to arrive at the training base, attackers ambushed an army bus outside. It was only because our reporters were held up that they were not caught up in the assault, in which a suicide bomber also detonated explosives, killing five soldiers.

The BBC's high risk advisers had already made clear that our team should confine themselves to reporting only from inside the heavily guarded base, as spending time with the recruits outside, whether in uniform or not, was deemed too dangerous.

So this report focuses on life inside the base, the eight week journey from arrival, through basic training, to the moment when they hear where they are to be posted.

We hear from the four young men about why they joined up, what their families think, and their own hopes and concerns, and we begin to get a sense of what facing the Taliban means for them.

We recently published another special report on the BBC News website - Life with the Lancers looking at the training, challenges and day-to-day lives of UK troops in Afghanistan.

This report complements that UK perspective with a view from the Afghan soldiers who are being prepared to take their places.

The report is also running in two separate instalments on BBC World News, and on BBC World Service. If you get time to have a look, let us know what you think.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

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Reporting from Libya is tricky at the best of times - clearly, the situation there right now is anything but.

For 41 years, Muammar Gaddafi - the self-proclaimed "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution" - has made life difficult for the Western media. While British nationals can enter many of the world's 192 countries without visas, or collect them on arrival, Libya is one of the exceptions. There, the door is firmly shut to international journalists, local reporters face intimidation and the threat of worse. It explains why, in contrast to recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, we're unable to report from inside Libya on the protests taking place there, and the authorities violent response.

And that's an uncomfortable place for us to be.

In recent years, from Burma, to Afghanistan and Zimbabwe - even in Iran and North Korea - my colleagues have been on the frontline, eyewitness to events making headlines around the globe. In Libya this weekend, we've been forced to rely on others' eyewitness accounts. The geography of the country - much of it is barren desert - means it's simply not practical for us to enter Libya "under-cover". Add to that, the ruthlessness of the Libyan authorities, and the scale of violence, and you'll understand why - just a week after covering Egypt's own convulsions - Jon Leyne is reporting developments from Cairo.

When violence was last visited on Tripoli and Benghazi, the BBC was there to witness events. Famously, Norman Tebbit condemned Kate Adie's reporting of the US airstrikes on Libya on April 1986. Twenty five years later, the protests - and the authorities' response - are taking place with no international reporters present.

The BBC and other news organisations are relying on those on the ground to tell us what's happening. Their phone accounts - often accompanied by the sound or gunfire and mortars - are vivid. However, inevitably, it means we cannot independently verify the accounts coming out of Libya. That's why we don't present such accounts as "fact" - they are "claims" or "allegations".

Similarly, the flow of video - the so-called "user-generated-content" - has dwindled to a trickle as the authorities have periodically turned off the Internet. That means we have an additional responsibility - to be clear with our audiences not just what little we do know, but perhaps more significantly, what we don't.

Critics of the BBC's coverage of Libya 25 years ago accused our reporting from Tripoli and Benghazi of being "riddled with inaccuracy, innuendo & imbalance". I suspect Colonel Gaddafi's supporters will make the same allegations about the international coverage of events in Libya this weekend. It wasn't true then, it isn't true now. But when we're not on the ground, we have to work twice as hard to make sure that we're telling all sides of the story.

Jon Williams is the BBC World News editor.

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