Qatar official calls migrant worker death focus a bid to 'tarnish' its World Cup reputation

A Qatar official has criticised the international media focus on the death of a migant worker in the country, as the World Cup host faces fresh scrutiny of its labour rights record.

Qatar is investigating the death of a migrant worker who reportedly suffered an accident while doing repairs at a resort that had served as training base for the Saudi team during the World Cup.

The Gulf state has come under scrutiny over conditions for the migrant workers who carried out the country’s titanic World Cup construction campaign.

Qatar relied on imported labour as it spent billions on new stadiums, metro lines and other infrastructure.

Nasser Al Khater, the head of Qatar’s organizing committee for the 2022 World Cup, said construction worker deaths were proportional to those in other countries.

Nasser Al Khater criticises journalists' focus on the migrant worker's death

"People need to look at death in a very scientific way," Mr Al Khater said.

"Qatar is like any country in world who has deaths in the construction industry."

“Unfortunately, people have failed to put that into context.”

The latest worker to die was a Filipino man who was fixing lights at Sealine Beach resort, a compound of villas, The Athletic reported.

It said he slipped off a ramp while walking alongside a forklift and fell headfirst against concrete.

The compound served as the training base for the Saudi team, before its elimination during the group stage.

Mr Al Khater expressed his condolences to the family of the worker and said an investigation has been launched to establish how the incident occurred."It's a tragic event, the passing of any individual is sad," he said.

"It is still under investigation on what happened and how it occurred, and obviously it is something that we feel very sad about."

Last week, a senior official in Qatar’s World Cup organization, Hassan al-Thawadi, put the number of worker deaths during construction for the tournament “between 400 and 500,” a drastically higher number than any other previously offered by Doha.

The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, in which Mr al-Thawadi is the secretary general, later said he was referring to figures of work-related deaths from 2014-2020 nationwide, not specifically for the World Cup.

Qatari officials had earlier said there were three work-related fatalities during construction of stadiums for the tournament, along with 37 other deaths of stadium construction workers not related to their work.

Mr Al Khater said people had failed to put the figures into context and blamed "irresponsible" journalists for trying to "tarnish the reputation of this World Cup."

"People have tried to put out false figures throughout the past 10 years and they have tried to mar the reputation of this World Cup and of the country by taking figures, putting them out of context and inflating them in a way that is absolutely false," he said.

"When we talk about World Cup projects we've had three fatalities, three work-related deaths. The figure of 400-500 relates to casualties of workers around the country - we are not talking about world cup."

Rights groups have said those statistics are incomplete, saying Qatar does not count deaths outside the work sites but caused by working conditions like extreme summer heat.

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