A World Cup match in Qatar was stopped for the first time due to an activist’s invasion of the pitch. With the inscriptions on the T-shirt: Save Ukraine, Respect for Iranian Women and holding the Pride flag, the unknown activist conveyed three important messages.
In Qatar, the match was stopped for the first time. No, this is not about a small power outage during Brazil-Switzerland. We are dealing with action-performance, which has multiplied during football matches.
An unidentified person for the media forced the Iranian referee of the Portugal-Uruguay match to stop the match for 5 minutes. The activist, dressed in a T-shirt with a Superman logo, had all three messages on an important topic.
Save Ukraine and Respect for Iranian Women – these two messages were written on the shirt of the activist man. He was holding an LGBTQI+ flag, which is banned in Qatar.
Fans arriving at stadiums in Qatar to support their national teams say paraphernalia with rainbow flags are either confiscated or their owners are not allowed to enter the stadium.
The fact happened at Lusail Stadium before Bruno Fernandes opened the score in the match against Uruguay. It is interesting and symbolic that the main referee of this meeting was Alireza Faghani. After the stewards caught the activist and removed him from the field, the Iranian referee himself had to take the flag from the field.
Obviously, all this, according to the protocol, did not get into the lens of any active camera during the live. Accordingly, all this became known through photos on the Internet.
What fate awaits the activist is not yet known, he has violated several laws of Qatar and the most grave of them is, of course, support for the rights of sexual minorities in the Arab country.
