Mohamed Salah’s personal bodyguard has revealed that all gifts sent to the Liverpool superstar are checked to ensure they do not contain items “that could kill him”.
The Egypt international has become a global phenomenon and one of the most recognizable figures on the planet. As a result, Salah can boast a growing fan base and a number of rivals who might want to harm him.
Karim Abdou is one of the people employed by Salah to make his life a little easier. The security guard told the podcast 5aSide that he took no risks when it came to gifts offered by supporters: “All gifts must be scanned. We don’t accept gifts, but sometimes if I get them from people they have to be scanned. You never know what a gift contains. It could make him sick or kill him, we don’t know.”
Salah won the Premier League and Champions League with Liverpool, and his European success in 2019 – after scoring in a final against Tottenham – took his fame to an even higher level. Abdou added: “It’s a ghost. We can’t see it. Once he went to pray in a mosque. No one knew where he lived and someone followed him. (The person who followed him put in a WhatsApp group: ‘Mo Salah lives at this address’“.
Abdou claims that 20,000 people went to this address, before continuing: “When he won the Champions League, it was the craziest moment. It was Eid and the prayer attracts thousands of people to the streets because it’s like Christmas here… He was supposed to go and pray in the streets with everyone and he had just won the Champions League, so everything people wanted to take pictures with him. All the Egyptian media, television, newspapers, it was like the World Cup final. They were lining up outside his house. At the same time, I was in a hotel with the Egyptian national team. He was supposed to finish his two days off and come here. Suddenly, he found himself inside the house without being able to open the door. They tried to get him out the back door, but they couldn’t.
