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A 27-year-old former Iranian wrestling champion, Navid Afkari, is said to have been executed in his country for allegedly stabbing and murdering a man in 2018, during protests against the repression and autocratic character of the Iranian regime. The one who guaranteed it was one of the main judicial authorities of the Farz province, Kazem Mousavi, who told Iranian state television that the sentence was applied in Adelabad prison, in the city of Shiraz, located in the south-west of the country and in the aforementioned province.
The entire trial of Afkari, a leading figure in one of Iran’s most popular sports, drew criticism and warnings from the international community. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, for example, had asked Iran to spare the fighter’s life, mainly due to doubts about the reliability of the accusation and the alleged evidence of the Iranian regime. Afkari, a known opponent of the autocratic Iranian regime, is singled out by many of his supporters as a victim of political persecution.
According to the Arab News website, Iranian state television broadcast a confession of the fighter last week, giving this video account that he was the perpetrator of the murder with which he was accused. However, suspicions that he may have been coerced and forced to confess to the crime are compounded even by the recent revelation of an audio recording in which Afkari said he was being tortured inside the prison, according to the British station of the BBC. The Iranian authorities deny having tortured the fighter.
On Iranian state television, some documents from the police authorities, although hidden and illegible, were shown as evidence in a news segment, and the motives for the murder were presented simply as a “personal dispute”, without further details.
The international organization World Players Association has already asked Iran to be expelled from world sport if the execution is confirmed, also considering that the fighter has become “unjustly targeted” by the regime for having participated in protests in opposition to the Government. And the defense of Afkari assures that, contrary to what the Iranian regime claims, there is no video recording to support the claim that Afkari was the perpetrator of the crime.
