Jordanian citizen Abdullah Ibhais previously worked with media and public relations issues at the FIFA World Cup organizing committee. He was arrested just over three years ago, in November 2019, and then sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “mismanagement of state funds”.
Ibhais himself believes he was forced to sign a confession which he later retracted. According to him, and several human rights organizations, the case instead concerns him who raises the alarm that the organizing committee in Qatar wanted to hide the fact that by demonstrating the migrant workers involved in the construction of the World Cup arenas had not received the their wages, as well as on working conditions in some of the arena’s constructions. He will nor did they receive a fair trial.
In connection with the imprisonment of Ibhais also arrested the two Norwegian journalists Halvor Ekeland and Lokman Ghorbani of NRK who was in Qatar to report on the World Cup. They had booked an interview with Abdullah Ibhais to be conducted the following day.
Ibhai’s family is writing to us now published the letter in which he said he was first abused in prison and then kept isolated in total darkness in a cell for four days, with cold air constantly blowing on him.
“He was sitting in a cell measuring one meter by two, with a hole in the floor for a toilet and temperatures down to zero degrees,” they say, they report The Guardian.
Photo: Jonas Lindkvist
Abdullah Ibhais is said to have barely been able to sleep during his time in solitary confinement. According to him, solitary confinement was meant to be punishment for contributing to a television documentary produced by the British ITV.
The family also directs criticism against FIFA, who they say was not involved in the case at all: “We, the family of Abdullah Ibhai, are calling on FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino, who once said that ‘the World Cup gives a voice to the marginalized’. Your actions they did not live up to your words. FIFA is complicit in Abdullah’s imprisonment and FIFA’s silence is tearing our family apart.”
According to the organization Fair Square, Abdullah Ibhais had contacts with Fifa before being imprisoned.
– He has written directly with FIFA’s human rights working group, Nicholas McGeehan tells The Guardian in Fair Square.
– But suddenly they just disappeared. They “ghosted” him, for lack of a better word, and he hasn’t had any communication with them since.
The Guardian newspaper has they have been in contact with both Fifa and the World Cup organizing committee who confirm receipt of the family’s letter and are aware of its contents, but have provided no further comment.
Several human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have previously criticized FIFA for not getting involved enough in the Abdullah Ibhais case.
Fair Square is now asking the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to take up the case, with the hope that Ibhais will be released.
In a previous statement at the British BBC Qatari authorities deny the allegations that Ibhais did not receive a fair trial, saying the evidence against him contained “extensive details of the crime – far more than was contained in his own admission”.
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