What started as a trip to another martial arts competition, ended with a story that is not ashamed of a scene from a Hollywood action movie when Haim Guzali, his son Elad and his coach Ben El Hasid were attacked in the hotel where they were staying and miraculously they came out safe and sound to tell the story. “I’ve been through a lot of crazy things in my life, but I still can’t digest this,” says Gozli in a special interview with “Israel Today” about the assassination attempt he went through in Ukraine.
So what actually happened there? Haim and his son Elad left last week together with Elad Ben El Hasid’s coach to Ukraine to compete in an evening of fights in the city of Kolomyia, located about three hours’ drive from the border between Ukraine and Romania.
Shortly after arriving at the hotel where we were staying for the battle, the journey took a turn and turned into a real horror scenario in moments. “We arrived at the hotel exhausted after a long journey through Romania, we checked in and we each went to our room to shower and get ready for bed. I hadn’t even had time to get into the shower and suddenly a war alarm went off. Elad and Ben Al ran to my room, the three of us trying to figure out what to do because no one You didn’t brief us so we just waited a minute and Ben Al went back to his room and within a minute I hear screams of terror outside the door.”
“When Chaim opened the door, he was surprised to find Ben Al wrestling with an assailant in the hallway,” Gozli says. “I open the door and notice all the shouting and the noise of things breaking from the entrance to Ben El’s room and see him fighting with someone. Of course I immediately jumped to help him and pushed the attacker away from him, the attacker fell back towards the stairs and then in a second it turned into a horror movie.
“He goes down three steps back and pulls out a gun from a bag he had in his hand. Before I can understand what is happening, I already find myself running with Elad when the man shoots at us from a range of almost zero, sure enough a man pulled out a gun and shot at us. Ben Al ran in one direction and I and Elad We ran in another direction and the only thing we could do was go out the window to the attached roof and hide there by the window so that if he came looking for us we would at least have the element of surprise and could throw him off the roof. So we ran out and hid on the roof.”
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Hasid managed to escape from the hotel while Gozli and his son had to sit for almost two hours in the pouring rain on a rickety tin roof that could collapse at any moment while they were barefoot and half naked until the local police took control of the situation.
“Me and Elad are sitting on this awning that will fall apart in a moment, the rain doesn’t stop and I have a cut on my leg that is bleeding without even knowing how I got cut in all this madness. Ben Al with us on the line informs us from outside that the local police have arrived and that they are negotiating with him, and I am trying to understand what burden And Mattan? The man tried to murder us, pulled out a gun inside the hotel and shot at us, chased us and broke half of the hotel, and they are having conversations with him while we are sitting naked and bleeding on the roof, which is unbelievable on a level that is hard to describe.”
At the end of long hours of waiting, the police released the three and housed them together in another hotel room, where they were instructed to stay there until the time of the fight the next day when their phones were confiscated.
“The craziest thing is that they didn’t take us in for questioning and didn’t collect official testimony from us,” recalls Gozli, “there was hardly anyone there who spoke half English and they just told us that they arrested the attacker without even seeing him taken away. You can hear the policeman asking us not to show anyone in the video The filming and everything there was just fantastic, but we couldn’t do anything.”
The next day, a vehicle with a police escort arrived and picked up the three for the fight, where Gozli won humbly and won the organization’s championship belt, but immediately after the end, the local police informed Elad that his fight, which was planned for the continuation of the event, was canceled, and that the three were immediately taken to the border with Romania.
“The way my fight ended, they took us, put us in the car and told us that Elad’s fight was canceled and that we had to leave Ukraine immediately,” says the Israeli fighter, “They took us for a 3-hour drive and dropped us off at the border. When we arrived in Israel, a representative of the MLA contacted me to clarify the case and I I’m waiting to see if I get answers because this story is simply ridiculous, I’m making every effort to get the footage from the hotel’s security cameras.”
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