A Turkish company has issued a mea culpa for an ad to sell hair removal products that used as one of its pitch images a photograph of an al Qaeda terror leader.
The cosmetics company Epila said it didn’t recognized that the man in the photo was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an al Qaeda terrorist who was the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, United Press International reported.
The ad displays the image of him from 2003, shortly after his capture, and shows the text in Turkish: “Waiting won’t get rid of that hair!”
Epila spokesman Mehmet Can Yildiz said to the Hurriyet Daily News: Sorry, we didn’t know who he was.
“We didn’t know that he was a terrorist,” he said, UPI reported. “This image is in popular use in Turkish memes on the Internet. The guy is quite hairy, so we thought his body was a good fit for our ad. We didn’t want to imply anything political. We didn’t know that it could become an international story. I repeat: We featured him for his hair, not terrorist.”
The terrorist is currently being detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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