World Cup organizer admits the deaths of hundreds of workers for the first time - Qatar drastically corrects the number upwards
Created: 11/29/2022, 7:07 p.m
By: Sascha Mehr
Guest workers building a stadium in Qatar (archive photo from January 2017) © IMAGO
In an interview, the General Secretary of the Organizing Committee of the World Cup in Qatar spoke for the first time of several hundred dead guest workers.
Qatar – The debate about the controversial World Cup 2022 in Qatar splits the football nation Germany.
Numerous people are boycotting the event because of the human rights violations and deaths of construction workers in the host country.
"The whole circumstances are such that they are certainly questionable," said DFB President Bernd Neuendorf before the start of the World Cup in the emirate, as also reported
by
fr.de.
The human rights organization Amnesty International, together with Human Rights Watch and other organizations, is demanding compensation payments from Qatar and the world association for workers who died, were injured or were exploited during the construction of the stadium for the World Cup.
World Cup 2022: "Every death is one too many"
Hassan al-Thawadi, Secretary General of the World Cup Organizing Committee, has now commented in an interview on how many guest workers died in connection with the World Cup in Qatar.
"The estimate is 400, between 400 and 500. I don't have the exact number, but every death is one too many," he told Piers Morgan for the British TV channel
Talk TV
.
So far, the world football association FIFA and official voices from Qatar spoke of only three dead guest workers on World Cup construction sites.
The organizing committee has so far remained silent on the exact number of guest workers who died in connection with the World Cup.
According to a 2021 report by the British newspaper
The Guardian
, more than 6,500 migrant workers are believed to have died in Qatar over the past decade.
The desert state always rejected this.
World Cup 2022: "Improvements in terms of safety and health standards"
In an interview with Piers Morgan for the British TV station
Talk TV
, Hassan al-Thawadi explained that there have been many reforms in recent years that are said to have improved the conditions for guest workers on the World Cup construction sites.
"We made the improvements in terms of safety and health standards and the abolition of the kafala system because it corresponds to our own values," says the 44-year-old.
Meanwhile, the football nation of Qatar suddenly has its own Ultras.
A report confirms a long-held suspicion.
(smr)
