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The mother of the Spanish football chief embroiled in a storm over a kiss has shut herself in a church and gone on hunger strike in support of her son as Spanish prosecutors opened an investigation into the case.
Luis Rubiales’ mother declared that she would not eat until the attacks on her son had ended, calling him the victim of an “inhumane and bloody witch hunt” over the non-consensual kiss on the lips of a World Cup winning player, according to the Efe news agency.
On another frenetic day in the kiss scandal, prosecutors said they had opened a preliminary investigation into “incidents that could constitute a crime of sexual assault”.
Noting that the player Jenni Hermoso has said “unequivocally” that the kiss was not consensual, prosecutors said that to open criminal proceedings they would need to receive a formal complaint from her in the next 15 days.
The developments came after a weekend when Rubiales was suspended as head of the Spanish football association by Fifa, the global game’s governing body, and faced mounting condemnation of his behaviour — and subsequent defiance — in Spain and beyond.
Also on Monday, Yolanda Díaz, one of Spain’s acting deputy prime ministers, linked Rubiales’ actions to a stark imbalance in gender representation at the football association, where only 38 of its top 411 officials, or 9 per cent, are women.
“The impunity with which Mr Rubiales acted shows that the federation is plagued by a deeply structural machismo,” she told RTVE television.
Arguing that the lack of gender equality was a breach of the law, Díaz said her leftwing party Sumar, an ally of prime minister Pedro Sánchez, was filing an official complaint against the Royal Spanish Football Federation to a government sports council.
Later on Monday, the association is due to hold an “extraordinary and urgent” meeting to address the crisis. It will be presided over by interim leader Pedro Rocha, a deputy vice-president who stepped into the role after Rubiales was suspended.
Rubiales has insisted that the kiss during the World Cup victory ceremony was consensual, even though the player has said that is “categorically false”.
His mother Ángeles Béjar, speaking from the Divine Shepherdess of Motril church in southern Andalusia, pleaded with Hermoso to “speak the truth” and “maintain the version you had at the beginning of this”.
She appeared to be referring to comments from Hermoso released by the football association in which it said the player described the kiss as “a totally spontaneous, mutual gesture”.
Hermoso has disowned that statement, saying last week that she was the victim of an “impulse-driven, sexist” act and had been “under continuous pressure to make a statement that could justify” Rubiales’ actions.
Béjar suggested ulterior motives lay behind the storm and said her son was “incapable of hurting anyone”.
After days of silence, one of Spain’s most prominent conservative politicians, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Madrid region, spoke about the furore on Monday and raised the spectre of media “manipulation”.
Referring to Catalan separatists who had disrupted the Vuelta a España cycling race by puncturing tyres with drawing pins, Ayuso wrote on X: “It is interesting that the international press is concerned about Rubiales’s disgraceful behaviour but nobody denounces the boycott of the Vuelta by independence supporters, the ones who negotiate with Sánchez.”
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