Who's the Iranian Parkour Champion Arrested Over a Kiss?

Famous Iranian parkour practitioner Alireza Japalaghi has been arrested, his brother announced yesterday.

News of Japalaghi's arrest came just after photos and videos of him kissing a girl on the edge of a tower block rooftop were widely shared on social media. Official sources have not yet confirmed the arrest but Japalaghi himself took to Instagram to tell fans he had been summoned by phone to "provide some explanations."

It is not known at this time which authority Japalaghi was summoned by. The next morning, his brother Alireza's brother wrote on Instagram that agents had arrested him at his home.

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Who is Alireza Japalaghi, and What Might He Have Done wrong?

In the video, gripping the edge of the roof of a tower with one hand, with his legs suspended in the air, Japalaghi holds and drinks from a cup of coffee. He talks about the benefits of coffee and kisses a girl. He then leaps from the edge of the roof onto an adjacent rooftop, pulls himself up over the high wall of a building, and kisses a girl on the edge of the roof.

In the past two years, Alireza Japalaghi has become famous on Instagram by posting exciting videos of parkour and dangerous movements on rooftops. His Instagram page is being followed by more than 100,000 people; followers who have repeatedly written under his posts that they are so terrified of watching the videos that they have not been able to watch them in full.

Japalaghi began training in gymnastics as a teenager. In an interview, he later explained that someone at the club had seen him training and noticed his obvious talent. "Have you heard of parkour?" he was asked. "I said no,” he said. “He said to go and search on the internet for the names of David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli."

That cursory search was all it took for parkour to become Japalaghi’s new focus. "I was trained for six months,” he said, “but our club was closed. I also went to the parks and streets to practice parkour movements. The kids of Taleghani Junction remember those days."

Performing in the park did cause Japalaghi serious injuries from time to time. "Once I was hit on the head,” he recalled, “and my memory was damaged. For a while, I could remember everything for only five minutes. I was treated for this condition."

But he never gave up on his dream of reaching the big time. "Ever since I started parkour, I’ve repeatedly told my father that I’m eventually going to Hollywood. He did not take me seriously, but when I was in my second year of high school, I made a black-and-white video of my sports movements, which impressed him very much. He showed the video to others and took my work more seriously."

A Family Torn Apart By Disappearance

Everything went well until Japalaghi reached the age of 18. One morning, he said, his father disappeared, and the family’s lives were turned upside down. Just two days ago, he posted two photos of his father, an anti-narcotics officer, in a new Instagram post about his disappearance. "Meet my father,” he wrote. “Mohammad Japalaghi, Tehran's anti-narcotics officer, who disappeared in a mysterious and silent in 2010 after 28 years of service, and had his case closed a few years ago. The situation is uncertain."

After Japalaghi’s father went missing he ran into serious financial difficulty and turned to sponsors for money. In an interview with the online channel Shofershow, he said: "Our only good fortune was that we owned the house and did not need to pay rent. But the financial situation was bad enough that I sometimes went hungry."

Japalaghi continued to practice parkour for some time, and when chasing up his father's case yielded no results, he tried to avoid yielding to military service. "No news of my father,” he wrote. “They did not give me a military service exemption card. I went and said I don't have a father now, but instead of giving me an end-of-service card, they would only postpone my deployment for three months."

Consequently, Japalaghi was unable to obtain a passport. He tried to get himself smuggled out of the country to Turkey but luck was not on his side, and he and his friends were caught by the border guards. "They warned us, fired shots, and we ran back towards Iran and did not try again."

Still his dreams of getting to Hollywood did not fade. "If I don't go to Hollywood, I have done nothing," he told Shofershow nine months ago.

Now Alireza Japalaghi has been arrested. But who arrested him, on what charges, and his whereabouts are still unknown.