Several former Afghanistan players have claimed the president of the country’s football federation ordered them to fix two matches during a men’s tournament in Malaysia.
The former captain Djelaludin Sharityar and the goalkeeper Aimal Gerowal are among those to have accused Mohammad Kargar – who has been president of the AFF since January 2019 and previously had two spells as coach of the senior men’s team – of working in collaboration with the notorious match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal and Dan Tan to arrange the results of games against Nepal and Sierra Leone at the Merdeka tournament in 2008. Tan was described in 2013 by Interpol as head of the “world’s largest and most aggressive match-fixing syndicate” but denies wrongdoing.
In October 2019 Fifa banned for life the former Afghanistan player Mohammad Salim Israfeel Kohistani and six other internationals after “an investigation lasting several years” that centred around matches that the convicted Singapore-based match-fixer Perumal had attempted to manipulate for betting purposes.
Several players who were part of the Afghanistan squad have alleged that Kargar was also involved in a plot with Perumal and his associate Tan in exchange for each player being paid $2,500 at the friendly tournament in Malaysia.
Sharityar and three other Germany-based players in the squad told the Guardian they refused to take part in the alleged fix and the former captain said he pleaded with Kargar not to go ahead with a plan to draw 2‑2 against Nepal at the Petaling Jaya Stadium in Selangor on 16 October 2008.
“The evening before the game we had a meeting with the rest of the players and we were arguing about how much money they were getting,” Sharityar said. “Kargar said that this was all they were going to get and started talking about the plan to fix the game. I said again: ‘Please don’t do it – we’ve improved over the past few years and we are qualifying for more tournaments but if you do this it will throw us back decades.’ But Kargar insisted it was too late as everything had been arranged.”
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Sharityar says he was so angered by Kargar’s determination to allegedly fix the result that he threw a chair across the room in the coach’s direction and stormed out of the meeting. Another player who did not want to be identified claimed Kargar had threatened him when he refused to take part.
“He said: ‘Tomorrow there’s a game and we have to play for a 2-2 draw against Nepal and each player would get $2,500.’ And I said clearly to him: ‘Listen, I talked to all the players from Germany, and I can tell you we don’t want to play at all. We don’t want to be involved in this matter.’
“He was also threatening me: ‘If you would do this it might have an effect on your family in Afghanistan.’ I understood the message and I told him we still don’t want to play.”
Kargar has denied the allegations and told the Guardian he was being targeted by “people who are living outside Afghanistan that want to damage the football in the country”. He said: “These people are talking about match-fixing but they didn’t find any evidence against me. Now they blame me for 2008. Fifa has investigated that case and everything was cleared.”
Fifa has been approached for comment. Gerowal, who represented Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and several other players identified Perumal and Tan as being at another meeting that took place in Kargar’s room on the day of the match. “All of the players were there apart from the four from Germany and there was some money on the table,” he said. “They both said to us: ‘You guys aren’t rich, your families are waiting back home and you have to buy some gifts for them’ and [were] really pushing us to take the money. They said they would call us and control our match.”
Neither Perumal nor Tan responded to the Guardian’s request for comment. The Germany-based players who had refused to take part were told to sit on the bench against Nepal and have said they heard Kargar issue clear instructions at half‑time and during the game just after Hashmatullah Barakzai opened the scoring for Afghanistan in the 62nd minute.
“He received a phone call and shouted on to the pitch in Farsi: ‘Let them score a goal now,’” Sharityar said. “When they conceded our players all pretended to get angry with each other for making mistakes. Then it was our turn to score and Nepal did the same thing. That happened four times and the final score was 2-2.”
The other player said: “It was so disgusting to see. The team was playing in a big stadium with a giant screen and occasionally you could see Kargar talking to someone on his phone. It was so cheap. The players were asking Kargar for any instructions what to do and it was so obvious that this game had been manipulated from both sides.”
Gerowal has said he spoke to Kargar after the match and told him he was going to report him to Fifa but was threatened. “I was so mad,” he said. “At that time all my family was in Kabul and I was seriously very scared. If I opened my mouth then my family was all at risk.”
The players have also claimed that Kargar had arranged to lose their second match 6-0 against Sierra Leone’s Under-20 side a few days later but that Hafizullah Qadami disobeyed orders by scoring a goal and the match ended 6-1. He never played for Afghanistan again.
In November 2016 the Afghanistan captain Islam Amiri admitted in front of the rest of the squad that he had taken part in match-fixing during the tournament in Malaysia but had never been punished. “His reasoning was that he was a young 15-year-old boy who was poor at the time,” read a statement released by the team. “He stated that as a young boy he could not say anything because this was a decision made by the elders and he had to accept it.”
Sharityar had also detailed his allegations against Kargar – all of which Kargar denies – on social media and in interviews with local media in Afghanistan but says he was never contacted by anyone from Fifa during its investigation. “I really thought something was going to happen and they were going to change it,” he said. “But they just punished Salim Israfeel Kohistani.”
