{"id":12876,"date":"2012-04-19T10:18:12","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T17:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2012\/04\/19\/german-iranian-referee-breaks-silence-over-suicide-bid\/"},"modified":"2012-04-19T10:18:12","modified_gmt":"2012-04-19T17:18:12","slug":"german-iranian-referee-breaks-silence-over-suicide-bid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2012\/04\/19\/german-iranian-referee-breaks-silence-over-suicide-bid\/","title":{"rendered":"German-Iranian referee breaks silence over suicide bid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-left: 10px; float: right;\" src=\"http:\/\/bc01.rp-online.de\/polopoly_fs\/b-name-b-babak-rafati-p-1.1474061.1321738728!\/httpImage\/3128690978.jpg_gen\/derivatives\/rpo32_457\/3128690978.jpg\" height=\"250\" width=\"317\" \/>AFP &#8211; Hannover,<strong> German referee Babak Rafati has broken his silence over his reasons for attempting to commit suicide last November, just hours before he was due to officiate a Bundesliga match between Cologne and Mainz.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The 41-year-old was discovered in the bathtub of his hotel room in Cologne by his assistant referees on November 19 last year, having slit his own wrists.<\/p>\n<p>After his condition stabilised, Rafati was treated for depression in a hospital near Hanover, but while he will not return to refereeing in the Bundesliga, he revealed that he has made a full recovery.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I am healthy again,&#8221; he told the website of German daily Bild, 151 days after his suicide attempt. &#8220;I was in a seemingly hopeless situation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It was a stroke of luck that I got help in time. I am glad that I survived.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Rafati&#8217;s suicide bid shocked Germany, two years after national goalkeeper Robert Enke took his life in November 2009 by throwing himself under a commuter train.<\/p>\n<p>Rafati, who is of Iranian origin, says he is planning a three-week vacation in Asia with his girlfriend and is still receiving regular supervision from a depression specialist.<\/p>\n<p>He says he is considering whether to return to his job in a bank and is planning to marry his girlfriend later this year.<\/p>\n<p>Rafati spent six years as a Bundesliga referee, officiating 84 games in Germany&#8217;s top flight, and was a FIFA-nominated referee between 2008 and 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AFP &#8211; Hannover, German referee Babak Rafati has broken his silence over his reasons for&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c20-other-news"],"views":13554,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22615"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}