In Côte d’Ivoire, the president of Africa Sports in Abidjan, one of the country’s most renowned football clubs, announced on Saturday that a coach had been suspended and expelled in February following an investigation into accusations of sexual blackmail and harassment. Players of the women’s team would have been victims of this coach and among them, minors.
With our correspondent in Abidjan, Francois Hume-Ferkatadji
The coach, described as ” intern “, under the blow of accusations of sexual harassment and blackmail, was therefore finally revoked.
In a press release, the president of the club indicates that the statements and the electronic messages obtained within the framework of the administrative investigation discreetly carried out among the athletes, incline today to a strong probability of the effectiveness of the alleged facts “.
The coach, in contact with the women’s team for a few months, is accused of having sent dozens of messages to several players demanding sexual acts in exchange for certain sporting favors such as playing time or jerseys.
The club made its decision public on Saturday, but the sanction would go back, according to the official press release, to last February 16, two weeks before the publication of the investigation by Romain Molina, the journalist who revealed the affair. The latter, however, claims that the coach was still in place until recently.
“ Coach Touré Macadi was not dismissed on February 16, assures the journalist to RFI. I take as proof the interview I had with the president of the women’s section of Africa Sports. He tells me that it’s lies, that he apologized in front of the group, that there was a meeting, that no player said anything, telling me “I need proof” – I want to specify that I have the audios of this -, “it’s a lie, we’re going to attack those who lie, he flirted with a player, the player recognized him, but flirting is not forbidden by the law.” [Le coach] was in training what the players confirmed to me. So this date of February 16 is a lie. »
24 hours after the publication of the investigation, on February 28, the president of the standardization committee of the Ivorian Football Federation, Mariam Dao Gabalan, announced the opening of an investigation. Since a pedo-crime case targeting the president of the Haitian Football Federation, Romain Molina has revealed several cases of sexual violence in sport, in Mali, Gabon and the Comoros.