Diego Maradona announces cash reward for finding man who initiate

Diego Maradona

Argentine football legend Diego Maradona is furious after a rumour claiming he was dead began doing the rounds immediately after Argentine beat Nigeria in a thriller on Tuesday. Maradona, who was very animated throughout the tense match, was helped out of his VIP seat by medical staff, and moments later, a video claiming he had passed away after suffering a massive heart attack, began doing the rounds of social media.

Maradona, through his lawyer, Matias Morla, is offering a cash reward to anyone who can find the person behind the voice in the video. "I've just spoken to my office in Buenos Aires and I have instructed them to make public the decision to offer a reward of 300,000 Argentinian pesos (R7,20,000) to the person who provides information about the author of the voice messages. When it comes to technological issues like these, I think we can get to the bottom of this. And if there's a financial incentive, someone who knows how something started often ends up revealing it and helping to unmask whoever was behind an atrocity like this," Morla told Argentine newspaper, Clarin.

According to reports, two recordings in Spanish went viral with one claiming that an adrenaline injection pumped into Maradona's heart had failed to save him. Another video claimed that the news of Maradona's death would only be announced the next day. It is learnt that Maradona had to call up his partner Rocio Oliva, while returning to Moscow in the early hours of Wednesday, to confirm that he was alive and that there the heart attack story was false.

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