Now that is some quick turnaround. Last night at about 1:30am I received a press release announcing Global FC 3, then just hours later they announced their full line-up for their tournament. It turns out that Peter Aerts is not participating in the tournament, instead he will be featured on the card, as will American Dewey Cooper. So the question arises of who is in this tournament?

Right now the names are Badr Hari, Peter Graham, Arnold Oborotov and Stefan Leko. Definitely an eclectic mix here, with Peter Graham fighting MMA of late in Bellator, Oborotov has been relatively quiet after getting his hype train derailed by Jarrell Miller and Andrei Stoica and Stefan Leko is, well, Stefan Leko. Leko’s career has had a few interesting twists and turns, but it is safe to say that Stefan Leko’s time at the top has come and gone.

The Badr Hari saga continues, and as of tomorrow he will be released from prison again tomorrow, where he will then await trial.

Today a court in Amsterdam determined that Badr Hari should be released from prison to await his upcoming trial for the charges that he faces. Once again, there are also conditions of his release. Badr can’t catering establishments between the hours of 8:00 PM at night to 8:00 AM in the morning.

Before Badr was taken into custody again last time, he also faced conditions that disallowed him to be in catering establishments, which he violated. He will again not be allowed to be in contact with witnesses with the exception of his girlfriend Estelle Cruyff. He also violated that condition prior to his current stint in prison as well.

The main witnesses in the case have been heard, although there are still some more witnesses left. The court deemed that it was unnecessary to hold Badr Hari any longer due to this.

The kickboxing world suffered another huge blow today, as It’s Showtime and K-1 fighter Hesdy Gerges was arrested for drug trafficking earlier today. The arrest of Gerges was in relation to a raid by Belgium officials in May, where Hesdy’s half brother, Ashraf and his friend were caught with 128 kilos of cocaine in Antwerp, Belgium. Gerges, as well as four more suspects were arrested today at the behest of Belgium officials, who will demand extradition.

Hesdy was asked about this last year and vehemently denied having anything to do with his brother’s drug smuggling operation. It is unclear what Hesdy’s involvement is at this point, but according to at5.nl, during the raid computers, phones as well as weapons and ammunition were confiscated, but it was not clear what, if anything was taken from Gerges. This comes hot on the heel of Ashwin Balrak’s arrest for drug possession in November, found with 82 kg of cocaine on him, as well as Badr Hari’s sprawling legal problems involving assault on a bouncer last year.

To compound matters, Mayor Van der Laan of Amsterdam has been very vocal about kickboxing and martial arts events, and was looking to crack down on organized crime in Amsterdam. He believes that kickboxing events bring organized crime to the city and parade criminals around as VIPs. He is unhappy with the image the city has and is looking to clean it up. There was talk of outright banning events, but Van der Laan has recently went on record stating that is not his intention.

With It’s Showtime’s next event on March 6th, it appears that Hesdy Gerges will not be able to fight in the main event against Daniel Ghita, as a case like this will take a while to be sorted out, especially because it involves an extradition process. [source]