Messi tells Barcelona he wants to leave
BARCELONA: Lionel Messi has told Barcelona he wants to leave the club after nearly two decades with the Spanish giants.
The club confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Argentina great sent a document expressing his desire to leave.
The announcement comes 11 days after Barcelona’s humiliating 8-2 loss to Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarterfinals, one of the worst defeats in the player’s career and in the club’s history. The defeat also capped a difficult season for Barcelona, the first without a title since 2007-08. Barcelona said the document sent by Messi referenced a clause allowing him to leave for free at the end of the season. However, it added the deadline for triggering that clause expired in June and it would seek legal advice.
NEW DELHI: Around the time New Delhi and Islamabad scrambled fighter jets at their borders following India’s airstrike on a terror camp in Balakot in February last year, Pakistani spy agency Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) asked Jaish-e-mohammed (JEM) operatives in Jammu and Kashmir to find out and pass on information on the location of Indian Air Force (IAF) bases, according to a charge sheet filed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in the Pulwama terror attack case on Tuesday.
The audacious February 14 strike by the Jaish in southern Kashmir’s Pulwama killed 40 Indian security personnel, triggered the IAF action against the terror camp deep inside Pakistan 12 days later, resulted in a dogfight between fighter jets of the two nations on February 27, and brought them on the brink of a war.
In its 13,500-page charge sheet filed in a special NIA court in Jammu, NIA named 19 people, including Jaish leader Masood Azhar and four of his relatives, for planning and carrying out the attack on a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy at the behest of Pakistan.
Of the 19, six are dead, three are absconding, and seven have been arrested. Azhar and his two brothers are believed to be in Pakistan.
As per charge sheet, Azhar’s 24-year-old nephew Mohammad Umar Farooq was sent to Kashmir in 2018 to execute the bombing. Farooq, who was killed in an encounter by security forces on March 29, 2019, was in constant touch with Azhar’s brothers Abdul Rouf Asghar Alvi and Ammar Alvi, and received directions from them before, during and after the attack, the charge sheet said. It also included transcripts of the chats between them.
Alvi told Farooq, the key figure behind the blasts, during one of these chats after the Balakot strike that ISI wanted Jaish operatives on the Indian side to find out about IAF’S bases from where the fighter jets were being scrambled, said an official.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT COMES 11 DAYS AFTER BARCELONA’S 8-2 LOSS TO BAYERN MUNICH.