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 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| The fear and uncertainty ended for Chance and other journalists at the Rixos al Nasr Hotel in Tripoli late Wednesday when forces loyal to deposed Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi released them and walked away after five tense days of confinement. 
 
 Among those set free was the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, the District’s former delegate in Congress, who apparently was in Tripoli hoping to arrange peace negotiations. Chance said Fauntroy, 78, was among those who safely left the hotel in a convoy arranged by the International Committee of the Red Cross. 
 
 The captives — most of whom represented international news organizations — were barred from leaving the hotel by about a dozen young men who stood guard in the Rixos’s marble lobby and roamed its corridors armed with assault rifles. Food and water dwindled over the course of the ordeal, forcing the captives to ration whatever they could scavenge from the hotel’s stocks. Air conditioning was intermittent, as was electricity, cutting off the journalists’ contact with the world outside. 
 
 The Libyan guards’ isolation was apparent, too; they appeared to believe their country was still controlled by Gaddafi even after rebels had stormed his compound about a mile from the Rixos. 
 
 While officials from the Red Cross tried to broker an end to the stalemate from outside the hotel, CNN producer Jomana Karadsheh tried to reason with her captors inside. Karadsheh, a Jordanian, told the men in Arabic that Gaddafi’s 42-year regime was crumbling. 
 
 She also told one of them, “I really miss my family and want to see them,” she said on CNN on Wednesday. The guard, who had told Karadsheh about his own family, “had tears in his eyes at that moment. I sat with him and told him things are changing out there. I said, ‘You have to think of your kids. You have to let us go.’ It was a slow process, a messy one.” 
 
 The reporters, many of whom wore body armor and helmets, left the hotel around 4:30 p.m. Tripoli time in the company of Red Cross officials. They were driven through rebel checkpoints — one a mere 150 meters from the hotel — and taken to another hotel, the Corinthia, in a safe area. They were reunited with friends and fellow journalists amid hugs and tears. 
 
 Fauntroy, a longtime civil rights activist, retired two years ago as pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood. He remains a member of the church. A church employee said she had no information about his condition, but Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), who succeeded Fauntroy as the District’s nonvoting representative in Congress, said in a statement that Fauntroy is expected to leave Libya soon. ||||| Chance, standing on far left, with other journalists who were held in the Rixos Hotel. | AP 
 
 NEW YORK -- For the past six days, CNN's Matthew Chance feared that he and roughly 35 journalists trapped by Gaddafi loyalists in Tripoli's Rixos hotel might be somehow used as part of the crumbling regime's endgame -- or even executed. 
 
 "We had been acting out in our heads these paranoid scenarios," Chance told The Huffington Post by satellite phone from Tripoli, just hours after safely escaping the hotel with his colleagues. 
 
 While the journalists' Libyan government minders had already fled, several Gaddafi gunmen wouldn't let them leave. That led to days of uncertainty for the journalists, as Chance and others remained cautious in how they described the ordeal for fear of repercussions. 
 
 "We took a decision collectively, the journalists in the hotel, that we wouldn't describe our situation as a hostage situation even though that's clearly what it was," Chance said. "We were being held against our will." 
 
 As rebels took control of Tripoli, Chance and the others faced miserable conditions inside the hotel that had housed foreign journalists during the war and had now become one of the Gaddafi loyalists' last strongholds. At times, the journalists were forced to lie down in a dark room without electricity, air conditioning or running water. Meanwhile, artillery shells fell and stray bullets struck the building. Understandably, Chance said journalists inside were "depressed," "felt like [they] were victims," and "were very frustrated that we couldn't get stories out, communications out." 
 
 But Chance got out news when he could. On Sunday, Chance appeared on CNN via Skype in a riveting 15-minute segment, complete with armed gunman yelling below. 
 
 WATCH: 
 
 And the following day, Chance broke the news on Twitter that Saif Gaddafi, the strongman's heir apparent, had not been captured as the NTC reported. 
 
 Although Chance has had a Twitter account for nearly two years, he barely used it before being trapped in the Rixos. Over the past few days, his Twitter feed made for compelling reading as Chance tweeted everything from the darkest moments (gunfire and lack of electricity) to more light-hearted situations (stealing cheese in a hotel pantry). 
 
 "I've never really used Twitter before," Chance aid. "I'm a convert now, though." 
 
 "I think as you're following somebody, you can really get a sense of what's going on in a more intimate way than virtually any other medium," he added. "I felt that I was communicating with a whole bunch of people who wanted to know more." 
 
 Chance, accustomed to collecting lots of information in order to produce a larger television package, embraced the short-form medium as a way to get out bits of information. And together, he said, those tweets provide "a much fuller, more intimate look" inside the hotel. 
 
 While Chance tried getting news outside by way of Twitter, he points out that it was only after information got inside that the gunmen let the journalists leave. It was only earlier today, he said, that the gunmen "started to believe the world outside the hotel -- that Libya had changed outside the hotel -- that this crisis came to an end." 
 
 "When they accepted that Libya was a different country and there was no Gaddafi in power anymore," he continued, "they literally handed us their weapons and said, 'You can go.'" 
 
 See a series of photos from the Rixos hotel during the "hostage situation":
– For the five days they were held in Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel by Moammar Gadhafi loyalists, Matthew Chance and his fellow journalists feared they could be executed or used as "human shields." "We had been acting out in our heads these paranoid scenarios," Chance told the Huffington Post hours after being freed. The loyalists "were very aggressive," Chance adds to the Washington Post. "They accused us of being spies … when someone holding a Kalashnikov accuses you of that, it can be quite unnerving." The journalists were sometimes forced to stay in a dark room with no electricity, running water, or air conditioning, as shells struck the building and bullets flew by—and, at least once, through—the windows; mortars exploded outside, and food supplies dwindled. The miserable conditions made the journalists "depressed" and "very frustrated that we couldn’t get stories out, communications out," Chance says, calling the experience "terrifying." But when the loyalists finally "accepted that Libya was a different country and there was no Gadhafi in power anymore, they literally handed us their weapons and said, 'You can go,'" Chance says. Watch Chance’s 15-minute CNN segment at left or check out his compelling Twitter feed here.