According to his family, a whistleblower who was imprisoned in Qatar for voicing concerns about the maltreatment of migrant workers on World Cup stadium sites was tortured on the eve of the tournament.
FairSquare released a letter from the family of Abdullah Ibhais, a former media manager for Qatar’s Supreme Committee, accusing Fifa of “callous indifference” for disregarding his case.
Foursquare is now requesting intervention from the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention in the hopes that Ibhais may be released from his three-year prison sentence.
Ibis’s family says in the letter that he spent four days “in utter darkness in solitary confinement after being physically beaten” as punishment for his participation in the ITV program Qatar: State of Fear? … with the air conditioning set to maximum and used as a torture instrument.
The letter says, “He was housed in a two-by-one-meter cell with a hole in the ground serving as a toilet and near-freezing temps.” “‘I already had multiple bruises from the prison guards’ abuse, and I was constantly shivering because the frigid air directed at me never ceased. I slept little during those four days,” he told us.
Ibhais claims he was imprisoned after raising concerns that the Supreme Committee intended to deny that between 4,000 and 6,000 Doha-based World Cup workers were involved in a walkout. According to him, 200 employees at Education City Stadium and Al Bayt Stadium lacked access to potable water and had not been paid for four months.
However, Qatari authorities insist that Ibhais, who was ousted from his position in 2019, was convicted of fraud related to a World Cup contract to produce social media content. Fair Square disputes this, claiming that he was forced to confess and denied a fair trial.
Nicholas McGeehan of FairSquare reported that Ibhais visited Fifa before his detention. McGeehan stated, “He was communicating directly with members of Fifa’s human rights section.” “However, at some time they just vanished. They ghosted him, for lack of a better term, and he never heard from them again after that.
In their letter, Ibhais’s family also explicitly criticizes FIFA. “We, the family of Abdullah Ibhais, are calling out Fifa and its president Gianni Infantino, who once declared ‘the World Cup is the voice of the oppressed,'” the statement reads. “Your actions do not match your words; Fifa is implicated in Abdullah’s detention, and Fifa’s silence is ripping our family apart. We reject Fifa’s callous apathy, and we will not yield.
We reached out to Fifa and the Supreme Committee for feedback. Both parties verified knowledge of the letter and its contents.
