Retired Iranian footballer Ali Daeni and his family were travelling from Tehran to Dubai on a Mahan Airlines flight when the Islamic Republic’s security forces forced the plane to land again shortly after takeoff to prevent him from leaving the country. Recently the footballer had been a very vocal critic of the current Iranian regime and many on the Internet surmised that this was nothing more than yet another attempt by the Islamic Republic to crack down against dissent that has been rampant throughout the country after the death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish women who was brutally beaten to death by the Islamic Republic’s morality police after they accused her of not adhering to the strict dress code that is imposed on women by the theocratic regime.
https://twitter.com/RKOTOfficial/status/1607370383287525376?s=20&t=TsE9CMx7kbJk0KCx_saP2w
https://twitter.com/Omid_M/status/1607405662484717571?s=20&t=TsE9CMx7kbJk0KCx_saP2w
https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1607451258717085696?s=20&t=TsE9CMx7kbJk0KCx_saP2w
Ali Daeni is the highest-scoring Iranian footballer in terms of international goals. He is highly regarded within Iran and is viewed as a national hero much like Lionel Messi in Argentina or Shahid Afridi in Pakistan. This incident caused widespread outrage amongst dissenters against the Islamic Republic as well as amongst Iranian society as a whole.