This article contains detailed descriptions of a violent attack and its psychological aftermath
On Tuesday, March 17, 2026, at approximately 10:50 a.m., according to the Alytus County Chief Police Commissariat, DFK Dainava star Jeremiah Chinonso was five minutes away from the team bus, following his regular matchday routine with his AirPods on, carrying the dream of one day playing for the Super Eagles, before everything was put on hold.
It was a clear morning in Alytus, a city of about 50,000 people in southern Lithuania. Chinonso, then 20 years old Nigerian attacking midfielder, was walking through a courtyard in the Vidzgiris district on his way to meet his teammates when someone grabbed him from behind.
He did not hear the footsteps.
“Suddenly, I just saw a hand grab me from behind, across my face,” Chinonso tells Soccernet Nigeria, speaking publicly about the attack in full detail for the first time. “I was thinking maybe it was a teammate trying to scare me, you know, like your friends sometimes do.”
It was not a teammate. The other hand held a knife.
“That was when my brain kicked in.”
What followed was a struggle that would leave Chinonso with stab wounds to his left hand, deep cuts that exposed the bones, requiring emergency surgery at Kaunas University Hospital that same evening. This left him with scars he can trace with his fingertips and a fear he cannot trace at all, one that lives somewhere behind his sternum and fires without warning whenever a stranger walks too fast behind him on the pavement.
It would also, in time, leave him with a story about survival, about the stranger who ran towards danger instead of away from it, and about the quiet, stubborn dream of a boy from Lagos who still believes he will one day pull on the green and white of the Super Eagles and never wash the shirt.
The attack brought football in Alytus to a standstill. Dianava postponed its scheduled First League fixture against FK Tauras “deeply shaken” by Chinonso’s near-death incident.
“What happened today is beyond comprehension and unforgivable,” the club said in a statement.
“I thought it was a robbery” — the attack
The attacker was masked with gloves on. Covered from head to halfway down his face. When Chinonso wrenched himself free of the grip and turned around, his bag, phone, and AirPods scattered across the ground between them.
“I thought it was a robbery,” he says. “I was like, two metres away from my things. If you're here to rob me, the things you want are literally on the ground. Just take them and run.”
The attacker did not want his phone.
He came forward again, knife first. Chinonso blocked the blade with his forearm. There is a scar there now. A pale ridge across brown skin, kicked the man, and they went to the ground together, tangled and struggling in the courtyard of an apartment complex in a city where, Chinonso says, the only black faces you see belong to the footballers.
“I was on top of him, and I was hitting him,” he says. “I was trying to take the knife away. But during that time, he was stabbing me on the side, on my rib area. I wasn't feeling it, because my adrenaline was so high. All my attention was just to take the knife.”
There was a point, Chinonso says, when he had to grip the sharp edge of the blade itself with his bare hand. It is why the hand is bent now, why the tendons and bones needed surgical reconstruction, and why he may need a second operation at the end of this season, in which surgeons will break the bones again to restart the healing process.
Watch Jeremiah Chinonso's hand after the knife incident:
“I had to hold the sharp side of the knife to be able to take it away from him,” he says. “There was literally one guy, one of the Lithuanians, who was close by. While we were tussling, I was screaming and shouting that he should come help me. And he was just there taking a video.”
Soccernet Nigeria later established that this person and the man who ultimately intervened were not the same individual. The man who saved Jeremiah Chinonso was coming from much further away.
The man who ran towards danger
Aldas Petrauskas was visiting a client on Naujoji Street when he heard the noise. From a distance, he saw something that made him run.
“From a distance, I heard screams,” Petrauskas told Soccernet. “Then I saw the knife. I shouted, ‘What are you doing?' But nobody responded. So I immediately ran towards them.”
When he arrived, the attacker and the footballer were already on the ground. Petrauskas did not hesitate. He pinned the attacker's knife hand with his legs.
“A struggle ensued, he resisted,” Petrauskas told the Lithuanian news portal alytusplius.lt after the attack. “Somehow I managed to take the knife away and throw it as far as possible. Blood, tension, adrenaline — everything happened at lightning speed.”
Petrauskas, speaking originally to Lithuanian outlet 15min.lt, later revealed a detail Chinonso himself did not know. “I shouted to the footballer to run, but he didn't run — he defended himself, struggled,” he said. “Later I asked the footballer why he didn't run. He replied that he himself doesn't understand why. Footballers are very fast, but probably the stress did its thing.”
Petrauskas saw other things, too. The attacker had aimed for the neck. For the head. He had an axe in his backpack.
“It's scary to think how it could have ended,” he said.
When the attacker was finally subdued, Petrauskas asked him a question. Why? What was the motive?
According to Petrauskas, the attacker — who appeared intoxicated — said he had no motive. He said he simply wanted to go to prison.
“He told me he wanted to go to prison. When he was lying neutralised on the ground, I asked him what he was doing. He said there was no motive, he just wanted to go to prison.”
Watch the neutralised attacker here:
Petrauskas called the ambulance. Within five minutes, paramedics arrived and treated Chinonso at the scene to stop the bleeding. Then they took him to Alytus County Hospital, where the wounds on his head and torso were stitched. When doctors examined his left hand, they saw it was too severe. He was transferred to Kaunas, an hour and a half north, for emergency surgery that night.
When asked if he had been afraid for his own life, Petrauskas offered six words that have since become something close to a national motto in Lithuania.
“My instinct as a human being was simply to help. That's it.”
He paused.
“Never ignore another person's misfortune. Whenever you have a chance, always try to help others.”
“My heart just dropped” – Aistė at the Balcony
“My first reaction was fear,” says Aistė Petrauskienė, Aldas' wife, speaking to Soccernet Nigeria. Everything happened close to their home. Close enough to see from the window.
She was inside the apartment putting their nine-month-old daughter to sleep when she decided to call her husband. She wanted to ask if he would be back for lunch.
She was walking through the apartment when something in the courtyard below made her stop at the window. She came closer to the balcony, and what she saw made her reach for her phone.
“I came closer to the balcony, and I saw two people lying on the ground,” she tells Soccernet. “One person was holding one of them down. And that second, my husband answered the phone. I quickly told him what I was seeing and that I was going to call the police. He said that he already had. And he said that he was there.”
She heard the ambulance then, and the knowledge of what that meant—that her husband was in the middle of whatever had required an ambulance—arrived before she had time to prepare for it. “My heart just dropped,” she says. “I sat on the floor for a few seconds, and I couldn't speak. Then I asked him what he meant—that he was there. He told me everything that had happened, and I was overwhelmed, because as a wife and a mother of two little girls, your mind immediately goes to all the what-ifs.”
When he came home, the what-ifs did not leave easily. They settled into the apartment alongside the relief, and for weeks afterwards, Petrauskienė found herself returning to the thought of how differently the day could have ended.
“It took me a while to process everything, because it was overwhelming,” she says. “To think about how differently the day could have ended. Our daughters are still little—one is three, and the other was only nine months. They had no idea what had happened. After that, we simply focused on being together as a family and appreciating the time we had with one another. This experience made us realise how precious life is, and how quickly everything can change.” She pauses. “But after all that, I was incredibly thankful that he came home safely to us. Now, if I look back, I know that he simply did what he believed was right in that moment. When he came home, I was just incredibly happy and grateful to have him back with us.”
When news eventually reached the Petrauskas family that the footballer Aldas, whom he had helped, had recovered and returned to playing football, Petrauskienė says they felt something close to collective relief on his behalf. “When we learned that he recovered and went on to play football again, we were incredibly happy, of course, about him,” she says. “As a family, we were really grateful that he was given that chance and opportunity to chase his dreams and inspire others. We couldn't be happier—not only for him, but for his family.”
The case that followed
The suspect was arrested on March 17, 2026, the same day as the assault. In an official statement published the following day by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Republic of Lithuania, the Alytus County Chief Police Commissariat confirmed that a notice of suspicion had been served on a resident of Alytus born in 2007.
He was a final-year student at Jotvingių gymnasium in Alytus and, according to Lithuanian media, was already of legal adult age at the time of the attack. The pre-trial investigation, led by Vytautas Gataveckas, Prosecutor of the First Criminal Prosecution Department of the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor's Office, established that the suspect had stabbed the victim at least three times in various parts of his body and had attempted to kill him. The suspect was taken into custody. He had no prior convictions or administrative penalties on record. According to the official statement, he admitted his guilt.
The initial charge brought against him was attempted murder under Article 22, Part 1 and Article 129, Part 1 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code, carrying a sentence of between seven and fifteen years.
On March 30, 2026, LRT.lt reported that the Kaunas Regional Prosecutor's Office confirmed the charge had been further reclassified to reflect racial hatred as a motivating factor, upgraded to attempted murder motivated by racial hatred. Separately, alytausnaujienos.lt reported that investigators were examining evidence suggesting the attack may have been planned over a period of two years. A psychiatric assessment of the suspect was also ordered as part of the investigation. Via a direct email provided on the Lithuania Police's official website, Soccernet Nigeria reached out to the head of the communication subdivision of the Alytus County Police Department, Ms Eglė Kačinskienė, for further comment. No response had been received at the time of publication.
He had never encountered Chinonso before. Did not know him. Had no connection to him. According to information shared with the club by police and the club secretary, the attacker had set out that day to assault a black person—any black person.
Chinonso was simply the one who happened to be walking through the courtyard at 10:50 a.m. with his music on. “I don't know the guy from anywhere, even till now,” Chinonso says. “If he walked past me, I'm not going to recognise him, because they covered his face. For one reason or another, they've refused to make his identity public. I think they want to protect their image.”
The question of motive is something Chinonso has turned over carefully, and he arrives at the same conclusion the prosecution eventually reached. “According to the police and our club secretary, he had been planning to attack any black person,” he says. “Maybe I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. If it was a mental health issue, I mean—he came all the way from home after going to school and went back to stock up his bag with different types of weapons and knives. He must have met his family, his sister or brother. If it were a mental thing, he would have attacked them. Why go all the way from your house, put on a disguise, and come to the streets to attack me on the road? I think it's racism.”
A state lawyer has been assigned to represent Chinonso's interests in proceedings expected to conclude around October or November 2026. Under the reclassified charge of attempted murder motivated by racial hatred, the suspect faces a sentence of between eight and twenty years in prison, or life imprisonment — significantly heavier than the seven to fifteen years that standard attempted murder carries under the Lithuanian Criminal Code. No one from the attacker's side has made contact with Chinonso. “It was just the Lithuanian citizens wishing me a quick recovery, saying nice words to me,” he says. “I haven't heard anything from him.” Justice, as Chinonso has learned, moves at its own pace, and waiting is its own kind of wound.
The scar that does not show
Six weeks after a stranger tried to kill him, Jeremiah Chinonso pulled on a DFK Dainava shirt and played football again. The hand was still in a protective brace, but the stitches on his head and ribs had closed, and he could run and pass and do the things that had made him love the game as a boy in Lagos.
The fans at his first match back welcomed him with a warmth that he still speaks of with visible gratitude. The club had stood by him throughout the ordeal — covering the surgery through his insurance, arranging a therapist, facilitating a visit from the Nigerian Embassy and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who were hosted for lunch and presented with club souvenirs. For those first weeks back, the sense of being looked after mattered as much as the football itself.
But there is a wound that stitches cannot close, and it has proven more persistent than the physical ones. The attack has quietly reorganised the texture of Chinonso's daily life in ways that are difficult to explain to people who were not there. He no longer puts both AirPods in when he walks outside—one ear stays open, always listening. If someone he does not recognise is walking behind him at pace, his chest tightens before his mind has had time to process the situation. If a stranger nearby seems out of place or is moving in a way that strikes him as odd, Chinonso waits for them to pass before he continues on his way.
“The first few weeks of it—I said, if I want AirPods, now I can't really listen to music on the road,” he says. “Maybe I can just use one. I can't really use it—even with one, maybe you're just walking, you're late, and you're walking fast. If someone runs and just goes past me, and I didn't see them before, the way my heart skips. It gets to you. And if I see anyone now that is looking weird, just going on their own—now I just wait for you to let go, then I walk behind. I don't want to just go about my day without looking over my shoulder. Before the incident, I always felt safe walking around. I could go out at midnight, ride a scooter with my friends, like, 11pm, go to a friend's place and stay till late—maybe midnight — then take a scooter home. Nothing happens. But now, because of the incident, even though nothing is going to happen, I'd rather be on the safer side. I just stay at home, or maybe leave earlier.”
He has tried to talk about it with friends from Nigeria — people who grew up in Lagos, where the calculus of personal safety is something you learn young and carry always. The responses were kind but not quite calibrated to what he had been through. “You know how Nigerians are,” he says. “They're like, ‘Why are you scared? It's something we're used to facing in Lagos.' But me, all my life, I've never been close to a near-death situation. It's normal to have PTSD after something like that.” He says the word—PTSD—without fanfare, placing it where it belongs, the way you name a condition that is not going away any time soon and that you have decided to coexist with rather than deny it. “With time, maybe I won't have to feel that way,” he says quietly. “Or maybe when I get to leave the country. I don't know.”
His family back in Lagos found out the way families in the social media age often find out about things they were meant to be protected from—through a post on the club's page, before he was out of surgery. A close friend who follows Dainava saw it and told his sisters.
They kept it from their parents until he could call them himself. “My sisters, they didn't tell my mum at first, because you know how mothers and fathers are—they might develop some sort of high blood pressure,” he says. “They didn't tell them until they were able to hear from me after the surgery. I called my mum. I called my dad, and I told them myself. They were worried, of course. But after they were able to hear from me, that was when they all calmed down. Everyone was worried, but they were just thankful that I was alive. Because being alive is the most important thing. Thank God it was just my hand. Imagine if the knife had slit my throat, or if he had stabbed me in my stomach — it would have been way more dangerous. So I just thank God.”
The number 10
Before the courtyard, the knife, the surgery, and the scar tissue accumulating in places both visible and not, Chinonso was, and remains, a footballer of a specific and increasingly unfashionable kind.
He is an attacking midfielder, left-footed, capable of playing on the right wing, devoted to the art of the through ball and the weighted pass. His idols tell you exactly what he is trying to become. He names Mesut Özil, Kevin De Bruyne, others, and then—in a category of his own, beyond argument—Cristiano Ronaldo. “He's my GOAT forever,” Chinonso says.
“Nothing can change that.” But it is the playmakers, the creators, the players who bypass the tactical system to do something the stadium did not see coming, who really animate him. “I just like players that are very creative,” he says. “They don't play based on the structure of the team — they like to think outside the box by themselves and do something extraordinary. That pass. That chance. That's the kind of player I want to be.”
He is aware that modern football has less and less room for this kind of player. The classic number 10 role, the free-roaming conductor who orchestrates from the final third, has been squeezed out by the pressing, the structure, and the demand that every player be a box-to-box runner first and an artist second. He knows. He is adapting.
“When I got to Europe, I had to understand that. You have to defend and attack. It's not like it was in the days of Ronaldinho and Kaká, and [Austin Jay Jay] Okocha.”
But there is something else, too, something he says with the particular weariness of a man who has been told too many times what his body should be capable of.
“As a black man, they feel like you're an animal. You need to run endlessly. Some of us have the energy, but not the way they expect you to run like an animal for 90 minutes.” He pauses. “But I'm adapting. And I think I'm doing well so far.”
The numbers agree. In 14 games this season, Chinonso has registered six assists and three goals—nine goal contributions from a creative midfielder in a second-division side. He wants 20 by the end of the season. He believes he can get there.
“I wouldn't even wash it” — the Super Eagles dream
There is a question that every Nigerian footballer who has not yet been called up carries with them through the training sessions and the long bus journeys and the games in half-empty stadiums in cities their families have never visited. It is a question about the shirt. Not the club shirt. The other Super Eagles' shirt. The one with the eagle. Chinonso does not need much time to find his answer.
“That shirt — I wouldn't even wash it,” he says. “I knew that every player, everyone wants to get the shirt off, but that one, the shirt I'm wearing that day? No. I wouldn't even wash it. I would laminate it straight after the game. Get signatures from everyone on it. I mean, I dream about that every time”
He follows the Super Eagles with the attention of someone who sees himself as a future participant, not an outside admirer. He watches Alex Iwobi's work from attacking midfield—”that's my position,” he says—Ademola Lookman and Samuel Chukwueze's directness on the flank.
He has not lobbied for inclusion or asked his agents to make calls on his behalf. His belief—stated with the calm of someone who has thought it through—is that a strong season will say more than any intermediary. “I feel like it's about timing,” he says. “There are some players who get invited to the Super Eagles, play one game, maybe don't play well, and you don't hear from them again. I don't really count on agents. I'm just trusting in God. And when it's my time, I'll be ready. Playing for the Super Eagles is my biggest goal.”
Five minutes
Chinonso was five minutes from the meeting point on March 17, 2026. Five minutes from safety, from the team bus, from a game that would have been played and forgotten like every other game in the Lithuanian second division.
In those five minutes, a stranger with an axe in his backpack and hatred in his bloodstream stepped out of a courtyard and changed a life. In those same five minutes, a 33-year-old father of two heard screams and decided to run towards them.
And in the apartment close to the scene, a young mother stood at the balcony window with a sleeping baby in the next room, watching her husband hold a stranger's attacker to the ground, and felt her heart stop and restart in the space between one ambulance siren and the next.
Chinonso is still in Alytus. He still walks to training. He no longer wears both AirPods. He checks over his shoulder. He waits for the odd-looking stranger to pass before he moves. He has PTSD that his Lagos friends do not understand and a bent left hand that may or may not straighten, depending on what surgeons find when the season ends.
He also has six assists, three goals, and a dream that has not bent at all.
“I'm a really talented player,” he says, “and I can play among and against the best players in the world.” He says it the way you might say the sky is blue—not to impress anyone, but because it is what he sees when he looks up.
Somewhere in Lithuania, a court is preparing to deliver a verdict on the stranger who tried to kill him. In the same world, a Super Eagles shirt with Chinonso's name on it exists in a future he has not yet reached but refuses to stop walking towards.
He will keep walking. He will keep looking over his shoulder. He will keep dreaming.
“Playing for the Super Eagles is my biggest goal. I dream about that every time.”
The music is quieter now. But the boy from Lagos is still moving.
Additional reporting draws from Lithuanian media sources, including DFK Dainava official website, LRT.lt, alytusplius.lt, and 15min.lt. Quotes originally given in Lithuanian have been translated into English.
