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Cuban woman says Maradona abused and raped her

AFP

A 37-year-old Cuban woman, who had an affair with Diego Maradona as a minor 20 years ago, accused the late Argentine idol and his entourage on Monday of violence and abuse, including rape and holding her against her will.

Mavys Alvarez Rego, who now lives in Miami, told the press in Buenos Aires how she met Maradona at 16, when the star, then in his forties, lived in Cuba, where he was undergoing drug treatment.

“I was dazzled, he won me over… But after two months everything started to change”, she said, claiming that Maradona, who died from a heart attack a year ago at the age of 60, had pushed her into trying cocaine, in turn making her dependent.

“I loved him but I hated him too, I even thought about suicide,” she said.

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Maradona is widely considered to be one of the greatest footballers in history and inspired Argentina to the 1986 World Cup.

He died last year after undergoing brain surgery on a blood clot, and after decades of battles with cocaine and alcohol addictions.

Alvarez Rego, a mother of two children aged 15 and four, said her relationship with Maradona lasted “between four and five years” but that she was subjected to abuse.

She claimed that during a trip to Buenos Aires with Maradona in 2001, she had been held against her will for several weeks in a hotel by Maradona’s entourage, banned from going out alone, and forced into a breast augmentation operation.

She also claimed that Maradona had “raped” her on one occasion at their home in Havana and mentioned several other episodes of physical violence.

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Alvarez Rego has not filed a complaint herself but is giving evidence this week in Buenos Aires to an Argentine prosecutor in connection with a complaint brought by an Argentine NGO.

The organization, called “Foundation for Peace,” filed the complaint after seeing her confessions in the American media in recent weeks.

The complaint relates in particular to human trafficking, deprivation of liberty, forced servitude, assault and battery.

Alvarez Rego said she was speaking out after so many years of silence in order to balance some of the stories that were being told in a TV series about Maradona in the run-up to the first anniversary of his death on November 25.

She suggested that she would not be initiating further proceedings.

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“I have done what I had to do, the rest I leave to the courts,” she said.

“I achieved my goal: to say what happened to me, to prevent it from happening to others, or at least so that other girls feel the strength, the courage to speak up.”

Five members of Maradona’s entourage who have been implicated have all denied the allegations via their lawyers. One has filed a counter-complaint against the NGO for slander.

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FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Arrested in Mexico and Deported to U.S.

Authorities in Mexico announced Thursday that Samuel Ramírez Jr., a U.S. citizen accused of murdering two women and listed among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, was arrested in the northern state of Sinaloa.

Ramírez Jr., 33, was detained Tuesday in Culiacán just 1 hour and 13 minutes after being added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Ten Most Wanted list, the agency said in a statement.

The suspect, who was born in California, has already been deported to the U.S. state of Washington, where he faces charges related to the fatal shooting of two women at a bar in Federal Way in May 2023.

A court issued an arrest warrant for Ramírez in November last year, and the FBI initially offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to his capture, later increasing the amount to up to $1 million.

“To protect individuals’ privacy and ensure continued cooperation from the public, the FBI does not confirm the identity of those who provide information,” the agency said in its statement.

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UN experts warn Nicaragua runs vast transnational network to monitor exiled dissidents

Nicaragua maintains an “extensive” transnational network to monitor and intimidate opposition figures living in exile, affecting “hundreds of thousands” of people, the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua warned on Tuesday.

In a statement, the experts said their report “details an extensive transnational architecture of surveillance and intelligence used to monitor, intimidate and attack the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans living abroad.”

The report, which will be presented on March 16 to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, states that the structure maintained by the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo includes the army, the police, migration authorities and diplomatic missions.

According to the statement, “the government has arbitrarily stripped 452 Nicaraguans of their nationality, left thousands more exiled in a situation of de facto statelessness, and prevented many from returning to Nicaragua.”

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Trump: ‘We Think It’s True’ Amid Claims Iran’s Supreme Leader Was Killed

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he believes multiple reports claiming the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the U.S. and Israeli offensive against the Islamic Republic are likely true, though he stopped short of confirming the news.

“We have a feeling that the information is correct,” he said, according to NBC News. “I don’t want to say anything definitive until I see it, but we think that’s the case. And many of their leaders have disappeared,” he added.

Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there were “many indications” that Khamenei had died in an attack on his residential compound.