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W/Cup: Workers in race to finish 696 feet luxury hotel

 

Fifty days before the World Cup kicks off in Qatar, workers are pouring concrete and hammering through the night to ready luxury hotels and bargain apartments for a million or more football fans.

Hundreds of migrants are labouring inside the 211 metre (696 feet) high Katara Towers, dramatically shaped like intertwined scimitar swords, where VIP guests of world football’s governing body FIFA will stay during the tournament.

The wealthiest will pay thousands of dollars a night for rooms with marble cellars and a lobby with one of the world’s biggest chandeliers.

Yet mountains of sand sit on the steps and some of the smoked glass windows are yet to be installed at this landmark on the Lusail seafront close to the stadium that will host the final.

“Everyone is working around the clock,” said one engineer on the project, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“It will be touch and go whether everything is installed to suit people paying so much,” this expert told AFP.

A spokesperson for the Accor group, which will run the Fairmont and Raffles hotels in Katara Towers, insisted they would be ready for “FIFA guests” during the World Cup and then officially open after the tournament.

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Forty kilometres away in Barwa Barahat Al Janoub, another army of labourers works under floodlights at night and scorching sunlight in the day, to ready apartments for fans paying $84 a night for a steel bed in a shared room.

The Barwa complex, out in the semi-desert, is expected to house more than 7,500 World Cup fans.

A source on the project which is 10km from a metro station said that hundreds of rooms still need to be finished and that workers were engaged in “a furious race against time”.

 

 

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