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Trabzonspor officials banned after locking referee in changing room

Trabzonspor president Ibrahim Ethem Haciosmanoglu and several members of his board have been given lengthy bans after a referee was locked in his dressing room at their stadium.

The club have also been ordered to play two matches behind closed doors after referee Cagatay Sahan and his officials were locked in overnight.

Haciosmanoglu was angered by Sahan's decision not to award his team a penalty late in last Wednesday's 2-2 draw with Gaziantepspor and ordered both him and his assistants to be locked in. They were released when the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, intervened.

"I told stadium security not to let the referees leave until the morning, until I arrived, but a very important person called me and asked me not to cause embarrassment in Turkey and around the world,'' Haciosmanoglu told the Dogan news agency at the time.

He said in a subsequent statement on his club's website that he took the measures for the officials' own safety. The statement, on Tuesday, read: "Our goal was to protect the referees from the crowd in Trabzon. We also arranged for the referees to leave the city without any problems.''

The Turkish Football Federation was unimpressed, though, and Haciosmanoglu has been banned from carrying out his official functions for 280 days and fined 150,000 Turkish lira (£34,250).

Club directors Yakup Aslan and Ali Uzunay were given bans of 410 days, while Koksal Guney, Omer Demir, Ali Kemal Basaran, Onur Incehasan, Seyfettin Tayfun Kahyaoglu and Mehmet Terzi were all banned for a year. All eight were fined amounts between 200,000 and 260,000 TL (£45,000-£60,000).

Suleyman Hurma was banned for 21 days and fined 25,000 TL (£5,700).