Former Liverpool and Barcelona striker Luis Suarez has helped talk a man out of a suicide attempt, according to reports from Uruguay. Suarez, who now plays alongside ex-Barca team-mate Lionel Messi at Inter Miami, had been enjoying a break in his home country and was walking along a beach with his wife Sofia Balbi in the Solymar region.
The forward, 37, was later alerted to a man threatening to jump from a six-metre-high tree. The 49-year-old man is said to have climbed up the tree with a rope and vowed to end his life unless his 53-year-old partner arrived at the scene. Suarez is said to have intervened, with a news clip showing him pleading with the man to come down, before working with a specialist group who had arrived at the scene.
Eventually he was successful in his attempts to save the man as he came down from the tree at around 5.30pm on Saturday following an ordeal that lasted nearly 20 hours. A woman named Andrea, who works for the organisation that helped bring him down, spoke of Suarez's heroics after playing a part in the operation.
She said: "Suarez, a well-known Uruguayan player, approached us. What we did was, during that time of containment, try to talk in an empathetic and close way so that it wouldn't be so long, even though this man has been there fighting for his life since yesterday.".
