Ethiopian Soccer Players Ask Italians for Asylum

Sixteen Ethiopian soccer players requested political asylum Wednesday in Italy, slipping out of their hotel in Ostia, near Rome, and trudging for miles in sneakers and their team uniforms.

The players, clutching passports, had disappeared early Tuesday.

“We had decided some time ago to leave Ethiopia, where there are political, religious and ethnic problems,” Mohammed Timam, a striker for Ethiopia’s national team, said at Rome’s police headquarters.

The team was making a stopover en route to an African Nations Cup game in Morocco.

Mario Lana, the lawyer for the players seeking asylum, said that on previous trips outside the country, team officials held the players’ passports.

This time, Timam told the Italian news agency ANSA, the players managed to get them back from the hotel’s front desk.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lorenzo Galanti, said he could not comment on the asylum request. But he said that in previous cases, Ethiopian soccer players were rejected and sent back after their cases were investigated over a few years.

*

In Cesare Maldini’s first game as coach, Italy beat Northern Ireland, 2-0, in Palermo, Sicily, on goals by GianFranco Zola and Alessandro Del Piero.

*

Major League Soccer has signed Argentine midfielder Daniel Peinado and assigned him to the Dallas Burn.

Jurisprudence

Oksana Baiul, the 19-year-old Olympic champion figure skater from Ukraine facing drunk driving charges from a Jan. 12 incident, was traveling at almost 100 mph when she ran her Mercedes off a two-lane road 10 days ago near Hartford, Conn., police said.

Linebacker Terrell Farley, kicked off the Nebraska football team after a second arrest for drunk driving on Nov. 20, has pleaded no contest to that charge and leaving the scene of an accident.

Brigham Young football player Derik Stevenson, from Diamond Bar, pleaded guilty to charges of possession of a gun on school premises and threatening or using it in a quarrel stemming from a fight at a male beauty pageant at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah.

Baseball

New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, appearing before a four-man committee that will determine the major league’s policy toward Japanese players, argued that pitcher Hideki Irabu should be a free agent able to negotiate with any major league team.

The San Diego Padres announced last week that they had obtained exclusive negotiating rights to Irabu from the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan’s Pacific League.

New York was interested in signing Irabu, and argued that a major league team can’t obtain exclusive rights from the Japanese club.

Houston Astro outfielder James Mouton, who has agreed to a $415,000, one-year contract, broke his right wrist while playing winter baseball in Puerto Rico.

Right-handed pitcher Jose Bautista, released by the San Francisco Giants last season, agreed to a minor league contract with the Detroit Tigers and will go to spring training as a nonroster invitee.

The Cleveland Indians acquired minor league catcher Sean Mulligan from the Padres for an undisclosed amount of cash.

Pitcher Scott Kamieniecki and the Baltimore Orioles agreed to a minor league contract.

The Yankees say they are retiring the No. 23 of first baseman Don Mattingly, who retired Tuesday. New York has retired Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 23, 32, 37 and 44.

Journeyman catcher Scott Hemond and pitcher Kevin Lomon signed contracts with the Texas Rangers’ triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City.

Figure Skating

In yet another display of Russian prowess, Marina Yeltsova and Andrei Bushkov performed an emotionally charged program and scored seven 5.9s and two 5.8s to win the European Figure Skating pairs title in Paris.

It was the 30th time in the last 33 years that former Soviet or Russian skaters won the pairs titles at the Europeans.

Names in the News

World Boxing Council super-lightweight champion Oscar De La Hoya and Olympic softball player Dot Richardson have been selected as the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s Southern California male and female athletes of the year for 1996.

Richey Reneberg was chosen to replace injured Todd Martin on the U.S. Davis Cup team for next month’s opening-round matches against Brazil.

Italian Piero Liatti drove a Suburu Impreza to victory in the Monte Carlo Rally, the first race of this year’s world rally championships.

Italy’s Thomas Prugger completed two runs in 2 minutes 12.86 seconds to upset American Mike Jacoby in the men’s giant slalom at the World Snowboarding Championships in San Candido, Italy.

Track and field Olympian Carl Lewis said in New Zealand that some countries were still defending drug-tainted athletes and loopholes must be closed to keep the sport clean. “There are still countries that fight for their athletes, even though they know they’re dirty, and I don’t think that’s going to change until everyone has a consensus and everyone refuses to accept the situation that people are on drugs,” he told Radio New Zealand.

Compton College will honor an alumnus, the late former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, at a campus memorial service next Tuesday. . . . Ted Bentley, a pioneer in Southern California sports broadcasting, died Jan 17.

Miscellany

Sports officials from high schools through the Olympics and professional leagues are teaming up to promote respect on the playing fields through the Citizenship Through Sports Alliance. It will be formally announced in New York next Thursday.