Former Arsenal and Barcelona star Pierre Emerick Aubameyang has opened up on the traumatic experience he and his family went through after gunmen broke into his Barcelona home and assaulted him in front of his family. August 2022.
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The former Arsenal star recounts, while speaking in an interview with The Athletic, how at least four men stormed his house in the seaside town of Castelldefels and stole jewelry, watches, and a white Audi A3 just days before he joined Chelsea from Barcelona in 2022.
Aubameyang left Barcelona just days after the incident, but the traumatic experience has had a lasting effect on both him and his family.
“My eldest son came running and said to me, ‘Dad, some guys are in the house.’ I said, ‘Just hide.’ They came in from outside, where my wife was smoking with my cousin and her boyfriend. They took him (the cousin’s boyfriend) and came into the house. My wife was screaming. They had a gun.”
Aubameyang described how he went upstairs with a large bottle to confront the intruders. “At the same time, my sister-in-law was there with our little one. I said to her, too, ‘Just go. Try to hide somewhere’
“This is when I saw the guys. There were four or five, I think. One had the gun and said to me, ‘Just go down.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. Tell me what you want’. We talked, and he said, ‘Sit down.’ I said, ‘No.’ This is when he started to punch me.”
Aubameyang recalls how a man wearing gloves containing metal broke his jaw after punching him multiple times, adding,
“I wanted to fight, but one guy went down and took my kids and sister-in-law,” he says. “At that point, I couldn’t do anything. If you do something wrong, something can happen to them. We went through the house, and I gave them what they wanted so we could be OK.”
Although returning to London provided some relief, the mental scars remained. Aubameyang's youngest child had difficulty sleeping for a year after the intrusion, as the striker admitted it was "always on his mind."
“I was always thinking about this,” he said. “I did so many nights like this: not sleeping at all, just thinking about that s**t. You have some nightmares. I’m a guy who, if I’m not sleeping well, I’m not going to give (a football team) what you expect from me, I’m not going to be at my best… Every time the kids are alone, they are scared. “I still have that house, but haven’t gone back since. I think I’ll start to rent it because my kids don’t want to go to Barcelona. Their school organised a trip there — they said, ‘No chance I go’. “I made a mistake not talking to anyone. If I had someone to talk to, a therapist or psychologist, maybe it could have helped. But I didn’t want to do anything. To tell you the truth, I was lost.”
Aubameyang and Behague have been together since his time with Saint-Étienne in France in the early 2010s. Recently, a gang of robbers reportedly staked out Aubameyang's house for weeks while he was away on a pre-season tour with Barcelona in the United States. They had attempted to rob him earlier but were deterred by an alarm. However, when Aubameyang was home, the alarm did not go off. The robbers entered the property by scaling a garden fence.
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