Rosario, Argentina: In the late hours of the night, two men opened fire at a closed supermarket owned by the family of Lionel Messi’s wife, before leaving a threatening message on the ground to the seven-time Ballon d’Or winner.
“Messi, we are waiting for you. Javacon is a narco, he will not take care of you,” said a handwritten message from the men who fired 14 bullets into the supermarket’s metal facade in the early hours of the morning. Thursday.
Pablo JauquÃn is the mayor of Messi’s hometown of Rosario, where the supermarket is located about 320 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires.
Javacon confirmed that the supermarket belonged to the family of Antonella Roccuzzo, who shares three children with the soccer superstar, and said the attack was aimed “to cause chaos in the city.”
“Here, what’s being looked for is reaction, it’s disgust,” he said. “What story goes viral faster in the world than the attack on Messi?”
An eyewitness confirmed seeing two men on a motorcycle before 3:00 p.m. One of them got down and opened fire, dropped the note and they both escaped.
“It’s been going on for a while,” Javakin said. “We have five security forces operating in Rosario yet they can do this because no one is chasing them.”
Ivan González, assistant chief of the provincial police, told Cadena 3 television station that the message was “not a threat” but an attempt to “draw attention”.
He said no one was hurt as there was no one in the premises at the time.
Federico Ribola, the prosecutor in charge of the case, told reporters that there were no known threats against Roccuzzo’s family.
“We are concerned, it has a huge impact, we have video images and we are looking for more cameras,” he said.
Rosario is a port city on the Parana River that has slowly become a nerve center for drug trafficking and the most violent city in Argentina, with 287 murders in 2022.
The centrist mayor, the left-wing governor of Santa Fe state, Omar Perotti, and the center-left national government regularly blame each other for anti-drug measures and the use of the city’s security forces.
At a meeting between municipal, provincial and national security forces this week, provincial minister Claudio Brilloni said he called for “greater cooperation, engagement and participation of federal forces” in the fight against violence and crime in Rosario. Is.
In the right-wing opposition, two declared candidates for October’s presidential election sought help from the military police to fight drug trafficking in Rosario.
“The situation in Rosario is complicated… the drug traffickers have won,” Security Minister Anibal Fernandez said.
