Gunmen have threatened Paris Saint-Germain superstar, Lionel Messi and opened fire at his family-owned supermarket in his hometown of Rosario in Argentina.
It was gathered that in the dead of night, two men fired shots at the closed supermarket belonging to the family of Lionel Messi’s wife, before leaving a threatening message on the ground aimed at the seven-time Ballon d’Or winner.
“Messi, we’re waiting for you. Javkin is a narco, he won’t take care of you,” said the handwritten message left on the ground by the men who shot 14 bullets into the supermarket’s metallic facade in the early hours of Thursday.
Pablo Javkin is the mayor of Messi’s hometown, Rosario, where the supermarket is located, some 320 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires.
Javkin confirmed the supermarket belonged to the family of Antonela Roccuzzo, who shares three children with the football superstar, and said the aim of the attack was to “to create chaos in the city.”
“Here, what’s sought is the repercussion, it’s perfidious,” he said. “What story goes more quickly viral in the world than an attack on Messi?”
A witness confirmed seeing the two men arrive on a motorbike just before 3:00. One of them got off, fired the shots, dropped the note and they both fled.
“This has been going on for some time,” said Javkin. “We have five security forces operating in Rosario yet they can do this because no one is chasing them.”
Provincial police assistant chief Ivan Gonzalez told Cadena 3 television station that the message was “not a threat” but rather an attempt to “attract attention.”
He said no one was hurt since there was no one on the premises at that hour.
Celia Arena, the justice minister for the Santa Fe province, reacted to the attack on social media,
She posted: ‘With the mafia attack on the Roccuzzo family’s business, knowing that it will be an event of global significance, the aim is to [install] terror in the population and unease in those of us who are in the battle against criminal violence. It is, neither more nor less, the definition of terrorism.”
The prosecutor in charge of the case, Federico Rebola, told reporters that there had been no previously known threats made against the Roccuzzo family.
“We’re concerned, this has a huge repercussion, we have the video images and we’re looking for more cameras,” he said.
Rosario is a port city on the Parana river that has gradually become a nerve center for drug trafficking and the most violent city in Argentina, with 287 murders in 2022.
