(CNN)Lionel Messi fans, the search is over.The boy seen wearing a striped plastic bag with the football player's name and number scrawled in blue ink has been found.
He's five-year-old Murtaza Ahmadi from Afghanistan who "loves football and Messi."
"When he suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night, he starts crying that he wants to go to Messi," his father, Arif Ahmadi, told CNN from the family's farm in Jaghori, south-west of Kabul.
Murtaza then started asking his father for a Messi jersey, Ahmadi said.
"I told him that we were living in a poor village far from the city and it was impossible for me to get him the shirt."
"He kept crying for days asking for the shirt until his brother Hamayon helped him make one from the plastic bag to make him happy.
"He stopped crying after wearing that plastic bag shirt," Ahmadi said.
Images posted to Hamayon's Facebook page show a smiling Murtaza wearing the shirt and appearing to dance.
Internet users started searching for the mystery boy in mid-January when a Leo Messi fan account on Twitter posted an image of him wearing a plastic "Messi" bag.
The photo showed him only from the back -- a small boy with a buzz cut wearing a brown knitted sweater -- with a message that read: "A kid in Iraq ..." It included an emoji of a breaking heart.