Part of the ransom money alleged to have been paid by the German government to win the freedom of Iraq hostage Susanne Osthoff last month was found on Osthoff after her release, the German magazine Focus said on Saturday.
Without citing its sources, Focus said officials at the German embassy in Baghdad had found several thousand U.S. dollars in the 43-year-old German archaeologist’s clothes when she took a shower at the embassy shortly after being freed.
The serial numbers on the bills matched those used by the government to pay off Osthoff’s kidnappers, the magazine said.
Efforts to contact Osthoff for comment through her mother and a friend failed.
A spokeswoman at the German Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the report. The German government is known to have paid ransoms for hostages in the past, but has refused to comment on whether it did so for Osthoff.
Osthoff, who converted to Islam and lived in Iraq, was seized heading north from Baghdad on November 25 by gunmen who threatened in a videotape to kill her and her driver unless Germany ended all support for the Iraqi government.
Speculation about the circumstances of her kidnapping and release has swirled in the German media since the German government announced on December 18 that she was free.
Two days after her release, the German government freed a Hizbollah member jailed for life in 1985 for the murder of a U.S. Navy diver. Berlin has denied a connection between the two events.
Osthoff herself caused a stir when she said in an interview at the end of December that she did not believe her kidnappers were criminals.
OH MY, this get’s even better:
The following translated from a report published today by the German news magazine Focus [link in German]:
http://www.trans-int.com/blog/exit.php?url_id=2375&entry_id=128
At the time of her liberation, Susanne Osthoff had a part of the ransom [paid for her release] on her person. Focus has learned that employees of the Germany Embassy in Baghdad discovered several thousand dollars. They found bundles of bills held together with rubber bands in Osthoff’s clothes as the archaeologist was taking a shower in the Embassy.
When officers of the Federal Crime Bureau [BKA – the equivalent of the American FBI] checked the serial numbers on the bills, they found that they corresponded to the ransom money paid by the federal government”¦.
Diplomats from the Embassy immediately informed the task force [for the Osthoff case] assembled by the Foreign Office in Berlin. There, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) is supposed to have ordered that “absolutely secrecy”? be maintained in the matter. Officially, the government has neither confirmed nor denied the payment of any ransom in the Osthoff case.
😕 How fortunate for Ms. Osthoff, to be kidnapped by such generous perps….. Or was there some other agenda going on there ❓ The perps "weren’t criminals"…. Then what were they, pray tell, accomplices? Sure would not like to make light of her time in whatever kind of captivity she was in. Maybe it started out as a genuine kidnapping with death threat, but perhaps she had a charming personality. However, when was the last time you heard of any captive, anywhere, being paid for their inconvenience?
I guess stranger things have happened.
But cutting loose the merderous perp whose gang beat and murdered our military hero, then help the perp escape US Custody in violation of prior agreements,
… (now,how does a polite person say this)….
*really* P1$$3$ me off. For all the good that does, at the moment at least. 😡