This five-year-old child sparked a worldwide search – and now Murtaza Ahmadi could be one step closer to meeting his idol, Lionel Messi.
The boy seen wearing a striped plastic bag with the football player’s name and number scrawled in blue ink has been found.
Ahmadi said he would be “upset” if his son doesn’t get to meet Messi – “because he really loves him.”
Arif said it was “one of the happiest moments” of the five-year-old’s life.
But Arif said Murtaza, unfazed by that, had been wearing one of the shirts and playing with the football ever since the gifts arrived.
“I love Messi, and my shirt says Messi loves me,” UNICEF quoted Murtaza as saying.
Earlier this month, the Afghan Football Federation told CNN that Messi’s charitable foundation was trying to set up a meeting between the seven-time world player of the year and Murtaza.
Asked about becoming an internet sensation, Murtaza told CNN from the family’s farm in Jaghori, southwest of Kabul: “The whole people in the world know me now.”
His father, who said the impacts of reports about his son from around the globe had “inspired me,” added that his dream was “to have a football stadium in our district.”
He explained that the plastic bag jersey had come about when he told his son “that we were living in a poor village far from the city and it was impossible for me to get him the shirt.”
Arif added: “He kept crying for days, asking for the shirt, until his brother Hamayon helped him make one from the plastic bag to make him happy. He stopped crying after wearing that plastic bag shirt.”
Internet users began searching for the mystery boy in mid-April when a Messi fan account on Twitter posted an image of him wearing the plastic bag Messi shirt.
The picture showed him only from the back – a small boy with a buzz cut wearing a brown knitted sweater – with a caption that read: “A kid in Iraq …” and included an emoji of a breaking heart.
The Iraq reference turned out to be false, and a Twitter user who wrote that the boy was from the city of Dohuk in northern Iraq later admitted that he had made that up.
Claims by a television station in Kurdistan that they had found the boy in Dohuk were also false.
“I feel very happy that he is famous now,” Arif said. “He is really excited that his pictures are everywhere now. He wants to become a football player in the future, and go to school.”
The program, in its 10th year, has helped more than one million children in Angola, Brazil, China, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa and Swaziland, and the new four-year agreement will see Barcelona increase its annual contribution from €1.5 million (£1.65 million) to €2 million.
