(h/t LGF)
Posted on 12/29/2005 2:23:10 PM PST by frankjr
If former hostage Susanne Osthoff had been better advised, she probably would have opted against appearing on German television entirely covered in a black headscarf. The hijab, which left only a pair of slits for her eyes, made the freed hostage look like a disturbing cross between a Chechen Black Widow suicide bomber and a ninja.
...the presenter explained that Osthoff's choice of dress was suposedly intended to preserve her identity --a bizarre thought considering that Osthoff's face has been all over the front-pages since November and most people in Germany must be quite aware of what she looks like. Besides, she didn't wear a headdress in her interview with Arab broacaster Al-Jazeera earlier this week.
The second shock for viewers was the rambling, incoherent nature of Osthoff's answers. Even the heavily edited version (ZDF spokesman: "We wanted to protect Osthoff from herself.") of the original 15-minute interview was barely comprehensible. Questions were left unanswered and at times Osthoff rambled off into non-sequiturs about how badly she had been treated by her landlord back in Germany. When asked how the kidnapping had been carried out, she was evasive, simply responding: "I think these details are not interesting. That doesn't interest anyone. Generally kidnappings are carried out quite violently. People watch a lot of television and realize perhaps that you don't let yourself get abducted voluntarily."
...mass-circulation Bild leading with "Susanne Osthoff: Crazed TV Appearance," complete with a half-page picture of the headscarf-adorning former hostage. The entire second page is taken up with what the paper calls "The Osthoff Mystery," which links her to Saddam Hussein's regime and asks where she got the money to send her daughter to an exclusive boarding school. "The puzzle of Susanne Osthoff will preoccupy us for a long time to come," the paper concludes, ominously.
(Excerpt) Read more at service.spiegel.de ...
(h/t LGF)
Maybe it wasn't really her
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