Ali Karimi and Ali Daei, two of the greatest footballers in Iran’s football history, are becoming increasingly serious threats to the country’s dictatorial regime, which has brutally suppressed protests over the torture and death of 22-year-old Mahsa. Amen. The latest evidence is the attempted kidnapping of 43-year-old Karimi, a former Bayern player who now lives in Dubai and whom the authorities wanted to return to Iran at all costs.
According to the Times, an unnamed Iranian celebrity close to the ruling group convinced Karim to meet him in Fujairah, a city about 130 km from Dubai, from where he would be forcibly taken to a ship and returned to Iran. . But what it was about, Karimi was informed in time, while Karimi’s friend and journalist, Mehdi Rostampour, narrated the course of events on social networks.
“A famous person told him that he also wanted to escape from Iran and asked to meet in person. Karim was suspicious from the start. He had no intention of going to the meeting and then, shortly before the meeting, he received a text from a friend: ‘Fujairah is a trap.’ Who was the sender? A person from the intelligence service”, Rostampour wrote.
He added that an intelligence operative had concocted a plan whereby Karim, upon returning to Iran, would be sent to state television where he would be forced to give a false statement. It would have sent a strong message to the demonstrators who have accepted Karim as one of the main figures of the protest and regularly chant his name.
At the end of September, after the former footballer, part of 127 appearances for the national team, openly criticized the government and declared that even “holy water cannot wash away the shame of Mahsa’s death”, practically an arrest warrant was issued for him by the News Agency. Fars, which is owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. She called him an agitator and called on the security services to “deal with him”.
Karimi regularly encourages his Instagram followers, nearly 14 million of them, to oppose the terror that has so far claimed at least 122 lives (according to unofficial figures and more than 200), and gives them advice on how to protect their privacy theirs online.
Although he was prosecuted in absentia for “sympathizing with the enemy and inciting riots”, and even his house in Lavasan was blocked, the representatives of the authorities claim that Karimi can safely return to his homeland. “Nobody has a problem with it,” said government spokesman Ali Bahadori.
Although he was prosecuted in absentia for “sympathizing with the enemy and inciting riots”, and even his house in Lavasan was blocked, the representatives of the authorities claim that Karimi can safely return to his homeland. “Nobody has a problem with it,” said government spokesman Ali Bahadori.
He added that he and other internationally recognized athletes who oppose the regime are getting a “distorted version of the protest”, which he blamed on the media. Ali Daei apparently also belongs to that group, whose passport was recently confiscated and then he returned to Iran where, according to the “Times”, he was arrested. At the same time, soccer officials are calling on FIFA these days to ban Iran from the World Cup.
First, Paolo Zampolli, the Italian ambassador to the United Nations, suggested in an open letter to Gianni Infantino that Iran be replaced by Italy (“because it is first in line according to the FIFA rankings”), and now a request by similar has arrived. from Shakhtar. Executive director Sergei Palkin said Iran was directly responsible for the “terrorist attacks on Ukrainians” and called on FIFA to react urgently. “It will be a fair decision because it will focus the attention of the whole world on a regime that is killing its best people and helping to kill Ukrainians,” Palkin said in a statement.