Phaedra
Almajid says the weight of evidence of wrongdoing from her and others
will be so overwhelming that FIFA will be left with no option but to
find another host.
Almajid
has been under protective custody of the FBI and she fears her safety
will be compromised further if the tournament is taken away from the
tiny oil-rich state, who shocked the world by winning the right to stage
the 2022 event in 2010.
While
hoping justice is done, Almajid admits that the prospect ‘scares me a
lot’ because some ‘extremists’ may feel she played a role in that
happening.
She
said: ‘There are people who are p***** off with me [for speaking out],
and what really p***** them off is that I’m a female, Muslim
whistleblower.’
Another
consequence of recent events, Almajid believes, is that outgoing FIFA
president Sepp Blatter may try to take 2022 from Qatar as part of a
radical reform agenda designed to win him praise ‘and save his skin.’
Speaking
for the first time since Blatter announced he wants a new election to
pick his successor Almajid said: ‘I just don’t think Blatter actually
intends to quit. Everything he does is very calculated. He’ll try very
hard to save himself, I’m sure of it.’
Almajid, an Arab-American now based in the US, worked for Qatar’s 2022 bid team until early 2010.
She told the Mail on Sunday last
year that a subsequent retraction of her allegations was coerced. In
fear of her safety for herself and her family - she has two children,
one of them severely disabled - she was taken into the protective
custody of the FBI.
The FBI are leading the investigation which has led to 14 arrests, with even more expected. ‘The FBI have everything,’ she said.
Almajid also co-operated fully with a FIFA-funded probe led by Michael Garcia, a former US attorney for New York.
When
another FIFA official, Hans-Joachim Eckert, released a summary of
Garcia’s findings last November, Eckert claimed there were ‘serious
concerns’ about Almajid’s credibility.
She had been guaranteed anonymity by Garcia. Instead she saw Eckert’s summary as a clear attempt by FIFA to smear her.
‘I’m still furious with the way I was portrayed,’ she says. ‘I was stupid enough to trust that FIFA wanted to find the truth.’
Almajid
insists that her anger today, however, is most intense on behalf of
others who have been victims of human rights violations in Qatar, across
many different sectors of society. This anger in turn is also aimed at
FIFA, a body that handed Qatar the 2022 World Cup.
FIFA whistleblower Phaedra Almajid is now under FBI protection and fears for her life
Speaking in an interview, Almajid said she would be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life
One
case of agonising personal interest to Almajid involves the deaths of
13 children in a fire at a nursery in a shopping mall in Qatar’s
capital, Doha, in 2012.
Among
those killed were two-year-old triplets Lillie, Jackson and Wilsher
Weekes, whose parents Martin and Jane have become close friends with
Almajid through their own quest for justice in Qatar.
The
couple are from New Zealand although Mr Weekes is British-born. Among
many shocking aspects of their case is that a member of Qatar’s royal
family, Sheikh Ali Bin Jasim Bin Al Thani, owned the nursery where the
Weekes’ children died, and was convicted in a Qatari court in 2013 of
involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail. But he has
not served a day of that sentence and instead continues in his role as
Qatar’s ambassador to Belgium, and to the European Union.
There
has been no official explanation as to why he remains at liberty. The
issue will be considered at a United Nations Human Rights Council
meeting in Geneva later this month.
Almajid
says: ‘The Qataris don’t care about human rights. There are human
rights violations being made across Qatari society and they make
promises to fix them - and they break every promise.
‘The
have said there will be justice for the family of the triplets who died
in that fire and there has been none. Instead the man responsible is an
ambassador.
‘The
Qataris promise they will fix the human rights abuses around the labour
being used to prepare for the World Cup. They haven’t and I don’t
believe they will.
‘The
Qataris don’t keep their promises. They won’t keep promises on human
rights. I lived there and worked there for seven years and I know that
the royal family there hate one thing more than anything - being
publicly shamed. They should be shamed for the treatment of the Weekes
family.
‘As
for FIFA, they talk of reform but the biggest reform they should make
in the process around the World Cup is to introduce a human rights
pillar. The World Cup should not be awarded to countries that don’t
respect human rights.'
