Amman: "We kill, we kill," muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq.

During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea of their whereabouts, the terrified quintet sat in adjacent, bare-concrete cells forbidden to talk to each other, their solitude punctuated by the screams of Iraqi prisoners being led away to torture from the cells around them, the thud of anti-aircraft fire and the pounding of US bombs that were exploding uncomfortably close.

Then, after sleepless nights and blindfolded interrogation sessions, they were released as suddenly as they were captured – seemingly after the intercession of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and other intermediaries. On April 2, the exhausted group arrived in the Jordanian capital Amman, where they told for the first time of their capture, ordeal and release.

"I frequently thought we were going to die," said McAllester, 33, a London-born Scot raised in Edinburgh and now working for the New York 'Newsday' newspaper.

Describing how Iraqi prisoners were in cells across a narrow corridor, McAllester said he had to turn his back to avoid watching other inmates being dragged away and tortured each night.

"We could hear screams, especially at night," he said. Unshaven, rib-thin and wearing a crumpled Thomas Pink shirt, he slowly detailed the conditions inside Abu Ghraib, where Amnesty International claims 23 political prisoners, mainly Shia Muslims, have been put to death.

"They were being taken from their cells for a session, or meeting or whatever you want to call it and were being beaten in front of us, a yard or two away from where we were sleeping, with some kind of implement," he said. "One night one guy was moaning for about an hour and it sounded like they brought a doctor for him.

"I have no idea who was doing it, whether it was the interrogators or the prison guards, but we saw a lot of people inside that prison who had been in there a lot longer than we were and who didn't have the support network to get them out."

Although none was given a reason for the arrests by Iraqi intelligence agents – in the early hours of March 25 while other Western journalists continue working – they appear to have been singled out because they did not enter on a regular journalist visa.

McAllester and Saman, 29, arrived in Baghdad a month ago with a group of "human shields" and although they insist that they clearly identified themselves as journalists on the group visa, McAllester admits they "pushed the envelope" by peeling away from the group with which they were supposed to stay.

Bingham, 34, once a photographer for Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, and Johan Rydeng Spanner, a 28-year-old Danish photographer, entered as tourists just before bombing began and said that they had planned to ask the authorities to change their status to journalists the day that they were arrested.

Bingham told how she had been seized by Iraqi intelligence agents in her hotel room and led away blindfolded with the others for what they were told would be a "few questions". Repeated interrogation sessions about their visas, photographs, stories and whether they were government agents left them fearing death either at the hands of their "disconcertingly polite" captors or from US bombers.

Forbidden to speak, she and McAllester developed a "three tap" code on their cell walls to assure each other that they were still there or draw attention to a noise or event.

None was tortured – McAllester saying simply, "I sense they knew we were scared enough and they didn't need to do anything more." Then, after seven days, their guards put them into the same cell for the final night before saying, "You must leave Iraq now and not come back."

Unwilling to believe that they were free until they had crossed into Jordan at 9 pm (Iraqi time) on April 1, all said they simply had no time to think about what they would do next.

None saw any other foreigners inside Abu Ghraib. But McAllester said that as he was ushered from one room, a quick glance around revealed something that gave him pause. "I believe I saw a British passport in a bag on a desk."