Omer Dahan's legal team has taken the fight over his suspension from Israeli football to the top of the police chain of command, filing an urgent complaint with Police Commissioner Dani Levi that accuses investigators of creating a misleading impression that a formal decision to prosecute the Maccabi Haifa forward had already been made, ONE reported.
The complaint, filed on Sunday by attorneys Amir Cohen, Sharon Braverman and Anan Faro, does not dispute that Dahan remains under investigation. Instead it challenges how that investigation was communicated to the Israel Football Association — communication that became the basis for sidelining him from the game.
The dispute traces back to August 2, when the police's serious and international crimes unit, Lahav 433, sent the football association's prosecutor a letter stating it had completed its investigation into Dahan and intended to recommend criminal charges. The association leaned on that letter when it petitioned the game's disciplinary court for his immediate suspension.
The court granted a 60-day ban on August 19, with the presiding judge finding that "heavy suspicion exists of offences damaging game integrity" and that letting Dahan continue playing under such a cloud was untenable.
Dahan's lawyers now argue that the way Lahav 433 framed its letter blurred a critical legal distinction. "There is a substantial difference between a recommendation and an actual prosecution decision," they wrote in the complaint, according to ONE, adding that "an individual not yet indicted should not be presented to external parties as though the indictment decision already occurred."
Under Israeli procedure, a police recommendation to charge a suspect is not the same as an actual decision to prosecute — that determination rests with state prosecutors, not the investigating unit. The lawyers contend the letter to the football association's prosecutor effectively collapsed that distinction, leaving the association, and by extension the public, with the impression that Dahan's case had already moved from investigation to indictment.
The complaint asks Levi for clarification on three points: whether a formal decision to prosecute actually existed as of August 2, who within the police or prosecution made any such decision, and through what authorised procedure information about the case was shared with an external body like the football association.
Dahan, 25, was arrested on June 14 as one of several suspects detained in a police operation targeting an alleged illegal betting and match-fixing network linked to a criminal organisation from Migdal HaEmek. He has been questioned over suspected illegal gambling, match-fixing, money laundering and tax offences, and has publicly denied fixing or selling any match.
He has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any offence. His lawyers frame the complaint as a matter of basic administrative fairness and the presumption of innocence, arguing that a suspect's professional livelihood should not be upended on the strength of a police letter that reads as more definitive than the actual state of proceedings against him.
Police had not issued a public response to the complaint at the time of publication, and Dahan's 60-day suspension from all football activity, imposed by the association's disciplinary court, remains in effect regardless of how the commissioner responds.
