France probes on-line threats towards Afghan taekwondo fighter

Afghan taekwondo athlete within the ladies’s -57kg class and an IOC Refugee Athlete Scholarship-holder Marzieh Hamidi, takes half in a coaching session at INSEP (Nationwide Institute of Sport, Experience, and Efficiency) a Olympic and Paralympic coaching centre in Paris on June 29, 2023. (Photograph by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

Paris prosecutors stated Monday they have been investigating on-line threats towards feminine Afghan taekwondo fighter Marzieh Hamidi, who fled to France in 2021 after the Taliban seized energy in Kabul.

Hamidi had suffered “cyber-harassment together with dying, rape and different threats by way of social media,” the prosecutors stated.

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They added {that a} specialist on-line hate unit was investigating.

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“I need the terrorists threatening me with dying to be recognized and tried in courtroom, in order that I can reside freely with out concern and in full security,” Hamidi stated in a press release despatched to AFP.

The martial artist “has been positioned underneath police safety for an indefinite interval,” stated her attorneys Ines Davau, including that “we hope the perpetrators of the threats will probably be swiftly recognized”.

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Hamadi didn’t handle to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics in her under-57 kilograms (126 kilos) class.

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However she has been within the media highlight in France for “talking out publicly about ladies’s rights and the Taliban regime,” based on her September 3 felony grievance, seen by AFP.

The doc states that the present wave of threats adopted her denunciation on social media of an August Taliban regulation barring ladies’s voices from being heard in public.

Hamidi reiterated her opposition to the regulation in a press interview and launched the social media hashtag #letusexist.

READ: No future for girls like me, says exiled Afghan soccer participant

From the afternoon of September 1, “an enormous wave of hatred smashed down on her… her Afghan Whatsapp cellphone quantity was shared and he or she obtained lots of of calls and hundreds of messages within the house of just some hours,” the grievance learn.

Hamidi’s felony grievance specifies the offences of sharing personal data, malicious cellphone calls, dying or rape threats, on-line harassment and on-line sexual harassment.