Heroin for a day in Tehran but with the handcuffs ready to snap on the wrists: Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian athlete who competed without a headscarf challenging the Islamic Republic, greeted with applause and slogans on his return to the Iranian capital, is under house arrest pending a “full confession” of his ‘crime’. The 33-year-old, revealed the BBC’s Persian channel, citing “informed sources”, she was taken directly from the airport, where she was expected by a crowd of over a thousand people, to meet with the Minister of Sport Hamid Sajjadi. Here, at the National Olympic Academy where she was already escorted by the notorious Iranian security men in plain clothes, the usual photo was taken with the head of the government to be fed to international public opinion, as if to sanction the end of the affair. . But the Tehran authorities would not have been enough for the climber’s attempt to downsize the gesture – “the hijab dropped me by mistake”, she wrote after the race – and she would have been threatened with the confiscation of over 250 thousand euros of assets belonging to the family. Now, the sources say, she is “under pressure”, evidently to clearly disconnect her sensational gesture from her at the Asian Championships in South Korea, where she participated in the final without the hijab, from the protests that inflame the country.
Iran, Elnaz Rekabi: “I apologize, veil moved by mistake”. Diplomatic sources deny the disappearance: “The athlete together with the team”
The veil has been compulsory in public since 1979 in the Iran of the ayatollahs, and is at the center of the demonstrations repressed in blood, over 240 dead, after the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish who died after being arrested by the moral police for not wearing the veil correctly. Even today, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Zahedan, in south-eastern Iran, the same city where on September 30 the police killed at least 93 people, in what has been called the “Friday of blood”. The demonstrators shouted “Death to the dictator”, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And a group of personalities from the world of Iranian football and sport has sent a formal request to Fifa to proceed with the suspension of the Football Federation of Iran – and therefore to exclude the national team from the upcoming World Cup – arguing that the ban on access to the stadiums of the Country for women contravenes the rules of the Federation. In the letter, the group stresses that the current situation in the country justifies the request “for an unequivocal and firm dissociation from the world of football and sport”.