Johannesburg -
Oscar Pistorius is believed to have deleted several of his tweets, including one from 2012 where he said he went into “full combat recon mode” after he thought he heard an intruder.
On Monday, social media expert and presenter on the dedicated Pistorius trial channel Emma Sadlier pointed out the missing tweets.
The Blade Runner had deleted tweets that suggested people follow the @OscarHardTruth account, set up by Pistorius’s public relations team, she said.
A look at Pistorius’s account on Monday indicated that these tweets were gone. Twitter user Jonathan Witt (@Jonathan_Witt ) posted screengrabs of the tweets, originally posted on February 24.
“Oscar Pistorius has also deleted this tweet from November 27, 2012, #OscarTrial,” Sadlier tweeted and posted a screengrab of it.
The tweet read: “Nothing like getting home to hear the washing machine on and thinking it’s an intruder to go into full combat recon mode into the pantry! waa.”
The @OscarHardTruth account has amassed a following of more than 38 000 Twitter users, but the PR team has tweeted just 10 times since it was launched three weeks ago.
“This feed will provide the hard truth and information that will become clearer during the trial,” the account managers said in their very first tweet.
Pistorius’s spokeswoman Anneliese Burgess said she could not speak directly to the athlete to ask about the tweets on Monday, but warned against speculating about why they were removed.
“Any deletions… can hardly have been affected to ‘hide’ anything… as both the tweets have been widely retweeted and widely discussed in the public domain,” she said.
She referred questions about the PR account to the athlete’s website which said the account would not be highly active, but “once the legal process has taken its course, the @OscarHardTruth Twitter handle will be reactivated as a stand-alone communication channel.”
The Star