A former Afghanistan international who was banned from football for life claims he was forced by his coach and the president of the country’s football federation to send emails to a notorious match fixer in a bid to fix the outcome of matches.
Mohammad Salim Israfeel Kohistani has accused FIFA of dismissing allegations that former AFF president Keramuddin Keram and Keram’s successor, Mohammad Kargar, who had previously spent two spells as coach of the senior team, had instructed him to send emails to Wilson Raj Perumal to settle the matter. results of matches against Nepal and Sierra Leone at the Merdeka tournament in 2008.
Kohistani was one of eight players found guilty of match-fixing by FIFA in 2019 following an extensive investigation into a series of international matches that “Perumal attempted to manipulate for gambling purposes”. But he has alleged that Keram and Kargar were involved in the plot.
“I wrote all the emails but they stood over me and told me to do it,” he told the Guardian. “I had no other choice. “The emails [from Perumal] said if you accept what we say, each player will get approximately $2,500 for each match and $10,000 for the AFF. I didn’t know at first that he was talking about match fixing, but I translated the message to Keram and Kargar and they said, ‘Okay, we’ll send them a list of the players.’ I told them we shouldn’t do this and they said, ‘Just think of your family and no one will get hurt.’”
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Kohistani has also alleged that Keram – who was banned for life from football in 2019 after sexually abusing female players – and Kargar had tried to fix several other matches, including the final of an under-23 tournament in Bangladesh and one of the first internationals of the women’s team. . “I wrote a lot of emails [Perumal] but only I was punished,” he said.
Kargar has denied the allegations as “baseless” and said he had been the victim of “character assassination”. “They want to tarnish the name of Afghan football,” he said. Keram did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
Last month, several former players who took part in the 2008 tournament in Malaysia accused Kargar – AFF chairman since January 2019 – of working with Perumal and Dan Tan to fix the outcome of matches against Nepal and Sierra Leone. Tan was described by Interpol in 2013 as head of the “world’s largest and most aggressive match-fixing syndicate” but denies wrongdoing.
FIFA was urged this month to reopen its investigation into match-fixing allegations against Kargar by a group of Afghan players who boycotted the national team in protest at his continued involvement amid previous claims of corruption against him.
Kohistani claims he first met Perumal in India, two months before the tournament in Malaysia, at a meeting in his hotel room where Kargar was also present – a fact disputed by Kargar. “Since I spoke some English, Kargar asked me to talk to Perumal and [Perumal] said he wanted to invite us to play in a tournament,” Kohistani said. “When we got back to Afghanistan, I got a call from Kargar and told me to come to the AFF office. Keram was there too.
“They told me to write an email to Perumal and I asked why I had to use my email address. They said I could create a new address: salimkohistani@hotmail.com, but they kept the password. So I started writing the emails and every day they wanted to contact him. I was summoned to the federation to send another email and then I would leave again. I was only 21 years old, so I didn’t really know what was going on.”
Kohistani has admitted that he was aware of the alleged plan by the time Afghanistan faced Nepal, which ended in a 2-2 draw. He and several other players claim they heard Kargar giving instructions to concede a goal after calling on his cell phone.
“I remember our coach had a phone on the sideline and then gave instructions to the defenders to concede a goal,” Kohistani said. “One of the players is now a coach in Afghanistan, so he couldn’t say anything about what happened. If they say something, they know they could be in danger.”
Several foreign-based players, including former captain Djelaludin Sharityar, refused to play for Afghanistan in protest over alleged match-fixing, but Kohistani – who played for local side Kabul Bank – says he was warned to keep quiet about what was going on happened. . “We were all under enormous pressure – if we said anything we knew we could be killed,” he said.
In April 2019, Kohistani was living in Denmark and playing for third-tier side Vejen Sportsforening when he received a letter from FIFA informing him that he had been handed a lifetime ban.
“I didn’t even know I was under investigation,” he said. “I contacted them to ask why they had not spoken to me and they said they had sent many emails to the same email address Kargar and Keram had given me. No one from the AFF had ever contacted me and I was told they said they had lost contact with me, which was not true.”
FIFA disputes this and says it has contacted Kohistani through the Danish Football Association. According to the ethics committee’s opinion, seen by the Guardian, Perumal asked Kohistani if he could take the Afghan women’s team to an unspecified tournament and was told: ‘I have spoken to them, they agree with your operation . [sic] to work with you.” On this basis he was found guilty. He was also accused of attempting to fix matches at an under-16s tournament called the Lion City Cup, and senior matches against Malaysia in 2009, Bangladesh in 2010 and 2011.
Kohistani appealed FIFA’s decision, arguing that he was “never able and in a position to decide on the composition and results of the national team” and “merely acted as an intermediary between (…) the Mr Kargar and the so-called football agent Mr Perumal”. He said he was “unaware of the seriousness of the debt at the time.”
The appeal was dismissed by FIFA’s appeal committee after deciding that “there is no reason to conclude that the appellant was coerced or threatened to communicate with Mr Perumal in the context of the match-fixing activities between 2008 and 2011”. However, it also said that “it appears that Mr Kohistani may not be the only player involved in the match-fixing activities and therefore strongly recommends that FIFA initiate further disciplinary investigations”.
That has yet to happen and Kohistani has since written to FIFA again asking for the investigation to be reopened.
“How is it possible that only one person is excluded?” he said. “I don’t understand how they can think that a player who is only 21 years old can make these kinds of decisions and that no one from the Afghan Football Federation was involved. I never said I didn’t write the emails. But I didn’t have access to that email account and that was my only role. I just wanted to play football and have a career.”
He claims his family has been threatened since he appeared on television in Afghanistan in early December when he detailed many of the allegations against Kargar and Keram.
“They were trying to find my family so they could get me,” he said. “I heard from my brother, who still lives in Afghanistan, that they had to find another place to live. We are very afraid of what could happen.”