The Paris Prosecutor’s Office indicated on Wednesday that it had opened an investigation based on the complaint filed by the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif for harassment, in connection with the controversy over his participation in women’s events of Olympic Games in Paris.
The procedure aims to determine if what happened to Khelif corresponds to the crimes of cyberbullying motivated by gender, public insult also based on gender, public provocation to discrimination and public insult due to their origin, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said.
The investigations were entrusted to the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH) of the French Gendarmerie.
The boxer’s lawyer, Nabil Boudiexplained that the purpose of the complaint is to determine who started the “misogynistic, racist and sexist campaign” against his client, in addition to knowing “who pushed this digital lynching.”
For the lawyer, “the unfair harassment suffered by the boxing champion will continue to be the biggest flaw of these Olympic Games.”
Khelif, who is 25 years old, won Friday’s subsidiary of the women’s under-66 category amid controversy surrounding her intersex nature.
At the center of the controversy is the suspension she was handed from last year’s world championship by the International Boxing Association (IBA), after she was subjected to an alleged femininity test the details of which were not disclosed and allegedly failed.
The IBA is in open conflict with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has rejected it and is not recognized as an international boxing federation.
Although the IOC allowed Khelif to participate in the Paris Olympics, the controversy over her case was reopened during the Olympics when she won her first match due to the premature withdrawal of Italian Angela Carini, an action that received support from the public the prime minister of his country, Giorgia Meloni, who said that this confrontation was not carried out on equal terms.
The controversy, fueled especially by far-right politicians, some of whom described the Algerian boxer as a transsexual without evidence, caused a wave of statements of transphobia against Khelif.
Source: La Verdad
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