Advertising online a hair removal product, a Turkish cosmetics company lighted upon a controversial celebrity sponsor:
The hirsute man in the ad is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 terror attacks who is currently imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. According to the company, they were unfamiliar with the picture — for a long time, the only known picture of the Pakistani al-Qaeda leader
“We didn’t know that he was a terrorist. 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,” a company representative told the English-language Turkish newspaper Hürriyet via phone on Tuesday. “We featured him for his hair, not terrorism.”
In the company’s defense, KSM could certainly benefit from the product.