The investigation was opened on Tuesday into “cyberharrassment” the Paris public prosecutor’s office told AFP.
The athlete’s lawyer Nabil Boudi said last week that Khelif, 25, had filed a complaint for online harassment, calling it a “fight for justice.”
“The investigation will determine who was behind this misogynist, racist and sexist campaign, but will also have to concern itself with those who fed the online lynching,” he said at the time.
French media reported that Twitter owner Elon Musk and British author JK Rowling have been cited in the complaint. The US magazine Variety, citing Khelif’s lawyer, said that US presidential candidate Donald Trump could also be included in the inquiry.
Khelif found herself at the centre of an online storm after questions were raised about her gender and eligibility to compete in the women’s event – at one point, Twitter users were posting about the boxer tens of thousands of times per hour, according to an analysis by PeakMetrics, a cyber firm that tracks online narratives.
What is the case about?
Khelif won gold after winning the women’s 66kg final against China’s Yang Liu in a unanimous points decision, having been the focus of intense scrutiny in the French capital during the Olympics.
She and another female boxer – Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who won the 57kg women’s final – had been disqualified from last year’s world championships after the International Boxing Association claimed that they had failed gender eligibility testing.
However the IBU has been banned from organising Olympic boxing events due to unrelated issues over governance so the International Olympic Committee was running the boxing events in Paris, and they cleared the two women to box.
The International Boxing Association’s Russian president Umar Kremlev has targeted both athletes, claiming that Khelif and Lin had undergone “genetic testing that shows that these are men”.
However in a chaotic press conference held in Paris during the Games, the IBU was unable to clarify exactly what tests it had performed, or what they showed.
Kremlev, an ally of Russian resident Vladimir Putin, also lashed out at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics during the press conference.
Khelif said she is “a woman like any other.”
“I was born a woman, lived a woman and competed as a woman,” she told reporters about her eligibility.
There is no suggestion that either of the women are transgender, and both women competed at the Tokyo Olympics without incident. Neither won medals.
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