Iranian Soccer Great’s Family Is Targeted After He Supports Protests

A lot is unsure concerning the incident involving Mr. Daei, together with the place his spouse and daughter had been headed — to a trip or to flee. Because the preliminary experiences first emerged on Monday, Iranian state media has supplied obscure and contradictory details about the case.

Mr. Daei instructed state media that his spouse, Mona Farokhazari, and daughter, Noora Daei, had been flying from Tehran to Dubai on Mahan Air, an Iranian airline, when the airplane was compelled to land on Kish Island, which lies within the Persian Gulf between Iran’s southern coast and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Daei, whose personal passport was reportedly confiscated earlier this 12 months, mentioned the 2 had been questioned and prevented from boarding a brand new flight to Dubai, then returned to Tehran.

“They handed by way of passport management and boarded the airplane fairly legally,” Mr. Daei mentioned on Monday, in response to state media. “If there was an issue, why didn’t they arrest them? If there isn’t any downside, why did they carry them again?”

By Tuesday, Mr. Daei had not backed down, telling the media, “I thank God that their airplane was not hit by enemy missiles” — a sarcastic reference to the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet by two Iranian missiles in January 2020, wherein all 176 folks aboard had been killed.

Mr. Daei, whose present location is unclear, didn’t reply to messages on social media or an electronic mail looking for remark.

Tasnim, a information company carefully linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, claimed that the pair’s true remaining vacation spot was the US. However Mr. Daei supplied pictures to Tabnak, an Iranian information website, of the ladies’s spherical journey flight reservation, displaying that they had been scheduled to return from Dubai to Tehran on Jan. 2.