Hotel management surprised that maid didn’t know identity of the man in Suite 2806

Nafissatou Diallo

The accuser of IMF boss Dominic Strauss-Kahn has been outed by Paris Match as Nafissatou Diallo. But some of the ‘facts’ of the case do not ring entirely true.

Nafissatou Diallo is a native of Guinea. She is a 32 year-old unmarried Muslim, with a 15 year-old daughter. Her dress code, marital status and age of having the child (17) would all suggest she isn’t a strict Islamist.

Yet neighbours ‘quoted’ in New York tabloids allegedly described her as ‘ a practising Muslim who wears a veil‘. Perhaps the neighbours were visually challenged.

Le Figaro last night reported that posters of Strauss-Kahn were  everywhere in the New York hotel (Sofitel). The paper commented, ‘Not surprisingly, the hotel management posted his face everywhere, advertising the fact that such a VIP had chosen their hotel as his venue’. Paris Match – which first named the maid – agreed with this account.

By any First World legal standards, this makes a nonsense of Ms Diallo ‘picking DSK out’ at an identity parade last Sunday afternoon.

The French website nanojv quotes an anonymous Sofitel source as saying, “Strauss-Kahn has stayed at this hotel six times since the start of 2010, and Nafi Diallo has been an employee here for three years. Her appearance of ignorance as to the identity of the man in suite 2806 strikes us as surprising”.

Yet Diallo – a French speaker – claims through her lawyer that she had no idea who the VIP was.

On France Deux TV last night, a fellow-guest told the channel’s reporter that in the lift immediately prior to checking out, “he [DSK] gave off an air of smiling normality”. The French State channel went on to claim that the IMF boss was “off to lunch with his daughter before catching the first available plane back to France”.

Yet the NYPD  insists he made a dash straight to Kennedy Airport in order to escape justice.

It also now transpires that the informant describing Diallo as “an exemplary mother” is not her brother at all, but one of her closest friends. That seems an odd mistake to make.

And answering The Slog’s question of yesterday, Le Monde reports that Diallo is being kept in hiding ‘by the American authorities’. Were she a mafia wife turning State’s evidence, that would be normal. But why the State has to ‘mind’ a non-US citizen accusing a man banged up on Riker’s Island escapes me.

A comment threader at the BusinessInsider website wrote as follows yesterday evening, ‘I love that the NYPD hauled his over-entitled butt right out of first class and off the airplane. That took some balls.’

I’d call that view worrying, mean, bigoted, xenophobic and unpleasantly envious. And bollocks.