Qatar World Cup organisers’ sinister links with terrorism laid bare

US governments issued statement that former president of Qatar FA Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi was a major financier of Al Qaeda

Another senior official chaired meeting with Hamas interior minister Fathi Hamad

Hamas are regarded as a terrorist organisation by USA, Canada and the EU

The bribes in the millions, the worker deaths in the hundreds, so how long do we let this travesty of a World Cup continue? It depends how seriously FIFA are prepared to take the next item on the Qatar 2022 agenda.

The photographs and reports that place leading members of the World Cup delivery team in the same room as advocates of murder. The links, the official support, for men who preach violence.

The more one peers beneath the surface of Qatar’s grand coming out ball, the more dangerous FIFA’s choice of host becomes. Jack Warner isn’t the half of it. Wait until the world discovers who else Qatar likes to do business with.

On December 20, 2013, the Treasury Department of the United States government issued a statement that Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, a Qatari history professor and human rights activist, was a major financier for Al Qaeda. Al-Naimi is also a former president of the Qatar Football Association (QFA).

The organisation he founded, Al-Karama, advocates for Islamist political prisoners throughout the Middle East and has campaigned against the US drone war in Yemen. Al-Naimi claims this is why the United States are attempting to smear him.

The Treasury insist that Al-Naimi oversaw the transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen over a period of 11 years.

In 2013, it says, Al-Naimi ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 to Al Qaeda via the group’s representative in Syria.

Al-Naimi may be ancient history at the QFA but Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed al Thani is most certainly not. He is a member of the Qatari royal family and the president of the QFA who in April 2013 held a meeting with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh to discuss what the Qatar News Agency termed ‘Qatar-Hamas relations’.

Hamas, a political organisation with a military wing which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 and carried out sustained attacks on Israel between 1993 and 2006, are still regarded as a terrorist organisation by the United States, Canada and the European Union. Qatar seem to rub along fine with them, though.

In October 2012, the Emir of Qatar was the first head of state to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza, pledging $400million in support. On April 24, 2013, Sheik Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al Thani, chairman of the Qatar 2022 World Cup Supreme Committee’s Security Committee as well as Minister of State for Internal Affairs, chaired meetings with Hamas interior minister Fathi Hamad.

During one of those meetings, Al Thani pledged the importance of maintaining a strong relationship and offered training and equipment to ‘strengthen the Hamas security apparatus’.

What might this apparatus be? Well, Fathi Hamad is regarded as the official responsible for co-ordinating the policy of the Interior Ministry and the terror squads.

In October 2009, he told a Palestinian news agency that his role was to ‘protect them and make their jihad operations easier to carry out’.

Still sounds vague? Well here is Fathi Hamad — friend of the chairman of the Qatar 2022 World Cup Supreme Committee’s Security Committee, remember — getting more specific in a speech in December 2012.

‘Today we celebrate, and God willing we will celebrate the future victories. We are aware that the future battles will be more brutal and more violent, nevertheless, we have a stronger, more advanced and more far-reaching plan, until the liberation of Palestine — all of Palestine — God willing.

‘We say in the name of all of you, out of loyalty to the martyrs’ blood and out of loyalty to the body parts: we will continue on the same path, with the same might, on the path of contribution and sacrifice.

‘Each one of us needs to promise to himself every day to continue on the same path, sacrificing and moreover being creative about the ways to get rid of this entity (he means Israel), to get rid of this cancer, God willing. The Interior Ministry continues to sacrifice martyr after martyr. Presently, in this battle, 25 martyrs joined the Interior Ministry’s caravan of martyrs.’

So that would be the Interior Ministry that is propped up by one of the leading players in the organisation of the Qatar World Cup. And there’s more. Here’s Hamad speaking on Hamas-controlled Al-Aqsa television in December 2010.

‘The Jews have become abhorred outcasts because they live off corruption and the plundering of the peoples — not only the Arab and Islamic peoples, but all the peoples of the world. Whenever we score a goal by achieving something against the Jews, the world applauds us. When we are playing, the entire world supports us.’

Nice football analogy there. Although he was a little more, shall we say, direct on Al-Aqsa in 2008. ‘Allah has chosen you to fight the people He hates most — the Jews. Allah said: “You shall find the worst enemies of the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.”

‘In other words, the Jews, who number 15 million, are equivalent to 4.5 billion infidels in their corruption and their struggle against the religion of Islam.

Therefore our heroic prisoners, who were arrested for killing Jews, should know that by the grace of Allah, killing a single Jew is the same as killing 30 million Jews. Therefore, the reward of our martyrs is great, and your reward is also great.’

A friend of the 2022 World Cup bid speaking, do not forget. And suddenly the corrupt former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner looks the least troubling of Qatar’s social circle.

Warner now stands accused, with his family, of accepting roughly $2m from the Qatari bid, the deal uncovered in an investigation spearheaded by the FBI.

Mohamed Bin Hammam, the FIFA executive member for Qatar, is alleged to have paid $1.2m to Warner in 2011. A note from one of Warner’s companies, Jamad, to Bin Hammam’s Kemco enterprise requests the payment for work carried out between 2005 and 2010.

The document is dated two weeks after Qatar secured the World Cup. Separate payments to Warner’s sons and a company employee are said to amount to a further $1m.

Then there is the mounting death toll of construction workers, which the International Trade Union Confederation estimates, at the current rate, will reach 4,000 by the time the tournament begins.

A small difference of opinion exists on this. Most of the builders are south Asian, mainly Indian and Nepalese. India says 450 of its nationals have died in the last two years in Qatar. Nepal says that 191 deaths were registered in 2013 and 169 in 2012, with a large percentage of the death notices citing heart failure as the cause.

This unfortunate spate of coronary illness, not at all linked to health and safety issues on construction sites, would tie in with Qatar’s official statistics on how many workers have so far been killed in building ventures linked to the 2022 tournament. None.

‘No one has died on World Cup projects,’ said the organising committee. ‘The International Trade Union Confederation report is littered with factual errors and attempts to discredit the positive work we are undertaking.’

Such a mission wouldn’t be hard, however, what with the backhanders, overtime at the morgue and now the possibility that FIFA may have got into bed with a bunch of terrorist sympathisers.

Sepp Blatter is well versed in batting away questions about Warner, even trying to take credit for his downfall, as if he hadn’t stood shoulder to shoulder with the odious creep throughout much of his reign as FIFA president.

He also tried to brazen out the subject of worker deaths last October, saying there was plenty of time to deal with construction issues in Qatar, as if fatalities today could be remedied over the next nine years.

To have leading Qatar 2022 officials palling about with men like Fathi Hamad, however, is not so easily dismissed. If this is the company they keep, then the growing influence of Qatar on sport and world football — from Paris to Barcelona and even Royal Ascot — needs to be addressed.

Not to mention what would happen if a lone Jewish construction worker died building a stadium in Doha, taking the death toll, by Hamas’s calculations, to 30million.

—Daily mail