Fact Check: Claims about Swiss Squash player Ambre Allinckx's refusal to play in India due to safety reasons are FALSE.
By Satya Priya BN Published on 12 Oct 2020 7:01 AM GMT
Hyderabad: Anti Rape activist Yogita Bhayana shared a newspaper clipping in Hindi on October 9, 2020. The paper clipping claims that a squash player from Switzerland Ambre Allinckx had refused to visit India over concerns about rapes and women's safety in the country.
"Thanks for making us Global Power @narendramodi " was the caption of the picture.
Archive links of the claims can be found here.
Fact check:
The claim that Swiss Squash player Ambre Allinckx refused to play in India due to safety reasons is FALSE.
This incident is NOT recent and occurred in 2018. According to reports published in Timesnownews, The News Minute, Indian Express and others published in 2018, 16-year old Swiss squash player Ambre Allinckx skipped the World Junior Squash Championship held in Chennai. Few newspapers reported that her coach Pascal Bruhin flagged safety concerns in India as the reason for skipping the tourney.
However, Ambre's parents have now released a statement denying that they were concerned about her safety in the country – or that that was the reason why she skipped the championship.
According to a release sent by the Squash Rackets Federation of India (SRFI), Allinckx's parents Igor and Valerie clarified in a message to squashsite.co.uk, a leading squash website, that, "We, as a parent, never were concerned about safety in India. This is a lie or a journalist invention."
"We wanted to have summer holidays as a family and due to the father (Igor) work, this has to take place in July. So nothing in our decision was about safety. Ambre has already traveled to Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Poland, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, etc and we never considered India as a place more dangerous than these ones. We never read articles or saw TV emissions about this. Again, this is speculation or invention," they wrote.
Therefore, the claim that Swiss Squash player Ambre Allinckx refused to play in India due to safety reasons is FALSE.
