Iran jails former goalie on national team after post bashing slain supreme leader |
Iran has jailed a former goalkeeper for the national men’s soccer team after he published earlier this year a post deeply critical of then-supreme leader Ali Khamenei, his wife said.
The Mizan news agency of the Iranian judiciary confirmed that Mohammad Rashid Mazaheri was under arrest, but said he had been detained after seeking to illegally cross the border.
Mazaheri won a handful of caps for his country and was in the Iranian squad for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, but spent most of his international career in the shadow of Iran’s undisputed number one goalie in recent years, Alireza Beiranvand.
The player, who also kept goal for top domestic teams, had in February published a since-deleted Instagram post in which he described longstanding supreme leader Khamenei as “only a dark and passing chapter” in Iran’s history.
The post came after January mass protests, which resulted in a deadly crackdown by the Islamic Republic’s security forces, but before the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran, in which Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day.
The Persian-language news site IranWire, which is........