World Cup security staff suffer in the silence of Qatar’s broken promises

S ix months on from that most memorable of World Cup finals, Shakir Ullah has been forgotten. Ullah, from Pakistan, spent the tournament employed as a security guard but has now been in jail in Qatar for almost five months. He was detained in late January as he tried to resolve a dispute over unpaid wages on behalf of hundreds of his co-workers. The men were deployed to guard key sites during the World Cup but were suddenly laid off in the days after the final, with about three months on their contracts.

The abrupt termination – in breach of Qatar’s labour law – left them homeless, jobless and in many cases, deep in debt. On that day, about 250 of them were detained and later deported. Ullah and two others were arrested and remain in prison. He has allegedly been sentenced to six months and fined 10,000 rials (£2,170); more than he made in the three months he worked at the World Cup. His appeal against the sentence was recently rejected. One source told the Observer that if he fails to pay the fine, his detention may be extended.

In Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Ullah’s wife and five children are in a desperate state. A relative said: “Shakir’s family is in real trouble. His wife is worried at every step.”

For years, Qatar and Fifa insisted things had changed for men such as Ullah and the hundreds of thousands of low-wage migrant workers who made the tournament possible. The World Cup would leave a lasting legacy of better workers’ rights in the country and the region, they claimed.

Today, those promises sound empty and instead of outrage that these men were cheated and deported or imprisoned, there is only silence. Fifa, which earned $7.5bn in the four-year cycle up to the World Cup, has nothing to say, despite knowing