TV presenter jumps from balconey to escape gunmen

A well-known Iraqi TV presenter threw herself off her second floor balcony to escape five masked gunmen trying to kidnap her and her husband, she said today.

Speaking from her hospital bed where she is recovering from multiple fractures, Nagham Abdul-Zahra said five gunmen barged into her apartment in the southeastern Baghdad neighbourhood of Risala yesterday morning and tied up both her and her husband.

“For a moment I thought it would be better for me to die in my own way,” Abdul-Zahra, a presenter of various variety shows on Sharqiya TV, told Associated Press Television News.

“So I stood up when one of the men told me to, and when he turned his head to check if my husband was still tied up tightly, I used that split-second to break away and jump off the balcony,” she said.

Despite suffering intense pain after surviving the fall, Abdul-Zahra started screaming for help and the gunmen fled after neighbours were roused by her cries. The assailants then left without harming her husband.

It was unclear why the men broke into the woman’s home, but she has been known to millions of Iraqis, even since before the 2003 US-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein, for her talk shows and variety programmes.