Many observers were surprised and others scandalized when almost immediately upon her release from Iraqi captivity last December, former German hostage Susanne Osthoff was quoted saying she intended to return to Iraq. Osthoff would later claim she had been misunderstood and that she had not in fact said this.
The following from a report in Friday's (17 February) edition of the Neue Züricher Zeitung:
Seven weeks after her release from captivity, Susanne Osthoff has returned to Iraq. She arrived in the Kurdish capital Erbil on Wednesday…. In a discussion on Thursday, Ms. Osthoff made clear that she felt misunderstood by the greater part of the public. There was therefore no reason to inform the public about her motivation [for returning]: the trip was a private matter. "I'm here to take care of some things that still have to be taken care of," she said and insisted that she was in Iraq for humanitarian reasons.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was cited on the same day by the German wire service dpa confirming Osthoff's presence Iraq. (If the trip was indeed a "private matter", incidentally, this begs the question of how he knew.)
According to a report in the Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag, Osthoff has in the meanwhile again left Iraq.
[Note: For more on the Suzanne Osthoff case, see the Trans-Int Susanne Osthoff File. Other Trans-Int Dossiers are available in the left sidebar.]
