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Argentine judge shelves abuse case by Maradona ex

AFP

An Argentine judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit brought by a Cuban ex-girlfriend of the late football icon Diego Maradona over alleged people trafficking.

The case was opened in September after an Argentine NGO filed a complaint in Buenos Aires after watching an interview given by the woman, Mavys Alvarez Rego, to US media.

Alvarez, who now lives in Miami with her two children, was 16 when she first met Maradona, then in his 40s.

During their relationship, which lasted four to five years, she said she was raped and held against her will.

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Her lawyers in Buenos Aires have appealed against the judge’s decision.

The case was brought against Maradona’s former entourage, accusing them of people trafficking, privation of liberty, assault and battery, reduction to servitude and introduction to drugs.

But in dropping the case, federal judge Daniel Rafecas wrote that the alleged offences “were mostly carried out by Maradona, with the secondary participation of his collaborators between November 9, 2001 and January 19, 2002.”

Alvarez’s lawyer, Fernando Miguez, argued that the complaint was against the entourage and not Maradona.

He said he would be filing a complaint against Rafecas and public prosecutor Carlos Rivolo.

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

He died in 2020 after undergoing brain surgery on a blood clot, and after decades of battles with cocaine and alcohol addictions.

Last year, Alvarez told Argentine press 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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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.