Two U.S. swimmers who were with Ryan Lochte the night of an alleged robbery were removed from a flight at a Rio airport on Wednesday night as they tried to leave the country.
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According to news broken by NBC National Correspondent Peter Alexander, and since corroborated by several news sources and the U.S. Olympic Committee, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger are being held for questioning as authorities investigate their claims of a holdup.
Jeff Ostrow, a lawyer representing Lotche, said swimmers Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger were taken off the plane.
Brazilian police and USA officials did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Feigen’s location. Teammate James Feigen was also stopped from flying home to the US, a police source said. Authorities then searched for the athletes at the Olympic village, but were unable to locate them.
A Brazilian judge earlier ordered the seizure of Lochte and Feigen’s passports.
The swimmers told the Associated Press and NBC they were returning from a party Sunday morning when their auto was pulled over by who they believed were police officers. He said one man apparently posing as an officer pointed a gun against his head and forced him to lie on the ground, robbing him.
Lochte also clarified why he didn’t immediately report the incident to the police, telling Lauer that he thought he and the other swimmers had broken some rule by being out drinking until the wee hours of the morning.
On his official Twitter account, Lochte said: “My hair is going back to its normal color tomorrow”, in what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to changing his appearance. NBC also aired surveillance footage that Brazilian authorities say shows the American swimmers returning to their lodgings in good spirits, showing no signs of distress.
Ryan Lochte of the United States attends a press conference in the main press center on August 12, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Blanc said that Feigen, however, told police that the athletes were surprised by multiple robbers but that only one was armed.
People magazine reported that Lochte, one of swimming’s most decorated Olympians, was spotted at an airport in North Carolina on Wednesday with his girlfriend Kayla Rae Reid, a Playboy model.
The court order was the latest twist in a story of a supposedly terrifying incident that embarrassed Olympic authorities and ramped up the fear factor for hundreds of thousands of tourists in Rio at South America’s first Olympics.
Although their passports were not ordered seized by the Brazilian judge, they now seem to be in some kind of legal limbo. Lochte also told Lauer that authorities never questioned his truthfulness, and even congratulated him on his performance at the Rio Games, where he won a gold medal in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay. Braziilans have reacted with anger to what many perceived as a false account of a robbery and began conjecturing over what might have happened.
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The video in question, posted on Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid website, shows the four swimmers passing through an X-ray machine, taking what could be wallets or cellphones from their pockets. If they need to get in touch with me, we have always been fully cooperating.
