Forty-one-year-old Sánchez went on a long journey with a small suitcase that he carried on a cart. For eleven months of travel, he had little more than a small tent, water purification tablets and a gas stove. He planned to travel thousands of kilometers to arrive in Qatar for Spain’s opening World Cup match against Costa Rica on November 23. He wanted to know how people live in other parts of the world. “The idea of this trip is to motivate and inspire other people, to show that you can go a long way with very little,” he told the Associated Press in late September while in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
There he praised the hospitality of the local family. He was going to camp in the mountains, but the owner of a nearby farm invited him home and offered him a bed, a shower and a hearty dinner. Then he entered Iran and lamented in the very first message that he encountered a completely different reality. He hasn’t heard back since. Although he warned his family that he might not always have an available internet connection, his relatives in Spain gradually became concerned. “We’re terribly afraid, me and my husband can’t stop crying,” Sánchez’s mother, Celia Cogedor, told the AP.
The Spanish Foreign Ministry only has information that Sánchez crossed the Iranian border. He doesn’t rule out any possibility of what happened to him.
People in Iran have been protesting since mid-September, when a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish origin, Mahsá Aminíová, died. The young woman was detained allegedly because she was wearing a hijab – a headscarf in Muslim society that covers her hair, neck and breasts – that women in Iran have been required to wear in public since the 1979 Islamic revolution. According to the police, she suffered a heart attack, but according to critics and her family, she died as a result of police brutality.
The demonstrations gradually spread to many cities and villages and were no longer just about wearing the hijab, but became a protest against Iran’s authoritarian regime. The security forces always intervened harshly against the protesters, using tear gas and live ammunition.
