Abdul Wali Skandar Khan was 25 years old. He was a civil engineer. He was Pakistani. He had two children. On 28 December 2023, he reported to work at a healthcare centre under construction within the NEOM zone in Tabuk province, Saudi Arabia. During the installation of a metal gate, the structure fell on him. He died at the site.
His death was not reported by NEOM. It was not reported by his employer. It was not reported by Saudi authorities. It was not investigated by any party with the legal obligation or institutional capacity to determine what happened, why, and who was responsible. It was documented, eleven months later, by ALQST — the London-based Saudi human rights organisation — which identified it as the first formally documented death of a migrant worker on a NEOM construction site.
The distinction matters. It does not mean Abdul Wali was the first worker to die at NEOM. The ITV documentary “Kingdom Uncovered” would report in October 2024 that approximately 21,000 foreign workers had died across Vision 2030 projects since 2017, with NEOM’s 140,000-strong workforce representing one of the largest concentrations of migrant labour in the country. It means he was the first whose death was documented by an independent organisation with the evidence, the methodology, and the willingness to put a name, an age, a nationality, and a cause of death into the public record. Before ALQST’s documentation, NEOM’s worker deaths existed only in the statistical aggregate — numbers without names, counts without causes, bodies without stories.
Abdul Wali Skandar Khan became, in death, the individual case that the system was designed to prevent from existing.
The Subcontracting Chain
The first fact about Abdul Wali’s employment is that he did not work for NEOM. He did not work for the primary contractor at the healthcare centre. He worked for a subcontractor of a subcontractor — a position at the bottom of a contracting chain designed to distribute liability so effectively that no single entity accepts responsibility when a worker dies.
Abdul Wali was employed by Falcon Group, a subcontractor. Falcon Group operated under a contract from China Communications Services (China Comservice), a Chinese state-owned enterprise that held the primary construction package for the NEOM healthcare facility. China Comservice held its contract from NEOM, the development company wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The chain — NEOM to China Comservice to Falcon Group to Abdul Wali — created four layers of corporate separation between the worker and the entity that commissioned the work. Each layer dilutes accountability. NEOM can state that Abdul Wali was not its employee. China Comservice can state that he worked for a subcontractor. Falcon Group, the subcontractor at the end of the chain, has the least financial capacity to compensate and the least reputational exposure to motivate a response.
When ALQST reached out for comment, China Communications Services did not respond. NEOM stated that “protecting welfare is a top priority” — a statement that applies the language of institutional commitment to the death of a man for whom no welfare protection proved adequate.
The Death
The healthcare centre was one of NEOM’s ancillary construction projects — not part of The Line, not part of Trojena, not part of any of the headline megastructures that draw media attention and architectural discourse. It was a hospital. It was the kind of practical infrastructure that NEOM needed regardless of whether its grander ambitions materialised. Abdul Wali was working on a component of NEOM that would actually be useful.
On 28 December 2023, during the installation of a metal gate at the facility, the structure collapsed onto him. The details of the collapse — whether the gate was improperly secured, whether the installation procedure followed safety protocols, whether the equipment was adequate for the task, whether there had been prior incidents with similar installations — have not been established because no investigation was conducted.
Neither Falcon Group nor China Comservice conducted a workplace investigation. Saudi authorities did not conduct an investigation. No police report was filed — a procedural omission that would create cascading problems for Abdul Wali’s family in the days and weeks that followed, because the hospital in Tabuk refused to release his body without a police report, and no institution was willing to produce one.
The gap between the death and the documentation — between the moment a 25-year-old man was killed by a falling structure and the moment any institution recorded that fact with the specificity necessary for accountability — was the gap the system is designed to create. In the absence of investigation, no cause is established. In the absence of cause, no fault is assigned. In the absence of fault, no liability accrues. In the absence of liability, no compensation flows. The worker dies. The project continues. The death is absorbed into the administrative category of “things that happen on construction sites” without the inconvenience of determining whether it should have happened.
The Brother
Meer Wali Khan is Abdul Wali’s brother. He holds dual British-Pakistani citizenship. When he learned of his brother’s death, he faced a situation that thousands of migrant worker families across South Asia have confronted: the body was in Saudi Arabia, the family was in Pakistan, and no institution in either country was actively working to bridge the distance.
Meer Wali travelled to Saudi Arabia at his own expense. The journey — from wherever he was in the United Kingdom to Pakistan to coordinate with the family, then to Saudi Arabia to retrieve his brother’s body — was funded not by the employer, not by the subcontractor, not by NEOM, and not by any government welfare programme. It was funded by a grieving brother who understood that if he did not go, no one would.
Upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, Meer Wali encountered the procedural consequences of the uninvestigated death. The hospital in Tabuk held his brother’s body but refused to release it without a police report documenting the death. No police report existed because no police investigation had been conducted. China Comservice stated that NEOM was responsible for logging workplace deaths. NEOM’s position on the specific case is not publicly documented. The circular attribution — each entity pointing to the next as the responsible party — left Meer Wali navigating between institutions that acknowledged the death but claimed the documentation was someone else’s responsibility.
The body was eventually retrieved. The circumstances under which the procedural impasse was resolved have not been publicly detailed.
The Compensation
China Communications Services deposited a small compensation amount with the Pakistani embassy in Riyadh — without consulting Abdul Wali’s family and without the family’s agreement to the terms. The amount has not been publicly disclosed, but ALQST’s documentation and Meer Wali Khan’s subsequent testimony indicate it was insufficient by any standard.
The family has been unable to access the deposited funds. The compensation was placed with the embassy as though the embassy were a bank that could hold disputed funds in escrow, rather than a diplomatic mission with no authority to adjudicate employment disputes or enforce compensation agreements. The family’s attempts to access the funds have been complicated by the absence of a legal determination of fault — without a police report or workplace investigation establishing that Abdul Wali died at work due to conditions within the employer’s control, the compensation is characterised as an ex gratia payment rather than a legal obligation, giving the family no leverage to contest its adequacy or access its disbursement.
Meer Wali Khan has continued to pursue the matter. He has cooperated with ALQST, spoken to journalists, and attempted to use his British citizenship as a mechanism for applying diplomatic pressure. The British government’s capacity to intervene in a Saudi workplace death involving a Pakistani national employed by a Chinese company through an anonymous subcontractor on a project owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is, in practice, negligible. The jurisdictional complexity of the subcontracting chain does not merely distribute liability. It distributes jurisdiction — placing the death in a space between legal systems where no single system has clear authority or clear interest.
The Pattern
Abdul Wali’s death established a pattern that ALQST, FairSquare, and Human Rights Watch would subsequently document across the broader Vision 2030 construction programme.
The pattern has six elements, and each element appeared in Abdul Wali’s case:
First, the subcontracting chain. The worker is employed by the entity with the least financial capacity and the least reputational risk, ensuring that the entity that commissioned the project — and that profits from its completion — is structurally insulated from the consequences of worker deaths.
Second, the absence of investigation. No workplace inquiry is conducted. No root cause analysis is performed. No corrective action is documented. The death is treated as an incident rather than an event requiring systemic examination.
Third, the death certificate problem. The official documentation of the death is either absent, incomplete, or inaccurate. Medical information is minimal or missing. The cause of death is listed in terms that preclude the assignment of workplace responsibility.
Fourth, the compensation void. Whatever payment is offered is unilateral, inadequate, and structurally difficult for the family to access. The payment is designed to close the file, not to address the loss.
Fifth, the family’s burden. The costs of death retrieval, legal navigation, and emotional processing fall entirely on the family of the deceased. No employer, no government agency, and no international organisation assumes responsibility for ensuring that the family receives the body, the information, or the compensation to which it is entitled.
Sixth, the silence. The death is not reported by any party with an obligation to report it. It enters the public record only if an independent organisation — a human rights group, a journalist, a persistent family member — invests the time and risk necessary to document what happened.
Abdul Wali’s death contained every element of the pattern. It is the reason ALQST selected his case as the first documented NEOM worker death: not because it was unusual, but because it was representative. The system that killed him and then failed to account for his death is the system that operates across every construction site in the NEOM zone and across the broader Vision 2030 programme.
The Samsung C&T Worker
Abdul Wali’s case was followed by ALQST and FairSquare documentation of another NEOM worker death that illustrated the same pattern with different specifics.
Badri Bhujel was 39 years old, Nepali, and worked as a machine operator for Samsung C&T, the South Korean construction giant, on a tunnelling project at NEOM. On 11 April 2024, he died. Five days before his death, he had vomited large amounts of blood at work and was taken to hospital by ambulance.
The hospital death certificate listed “alveolar and parietoalveolar conditions” and pulmonary tuberculosis — diagnosed two days before his death. The Saudi Ministry of Interior death certificate stated only “natural death” and included no medical information. The gap between the two documents — one describing a respiratory condition linked to construction dust exposure, the other describing “natural death” as though a 39-year-old machine operator’s lungs failed spontaneously — is the gap between what happened and what the system recorded.
Bhujel’s case added a dimension that Abdul Wali’s did not: the specific occupational health risk of tunnel construction. Tunnel workers are exposed to silica dust, which causes silicosis — an irreversible and often fatal lung disease. The peer-reviewed medical literature linking tunnel construction to respiratory death is extensive and uncontested. Bhujel worked in tunnels. He died of respiratory failure. The connection was not investigated because the system does not investigate connections. It classifies deaths and closes files.
The First, Not the Only
ALQST’s identification of Abdul Wali Skandar Khan as the first documented NEOM worker death was published in November 2024 — eleven months after his death and one month after the ITV documentary reported that 21,000 workers had died across Vision 2030 projects. The timing was not coincidental. The documentary’s aggregate figure created a context in which individual cases acquired evidentiary weight they had not previously carried.
Before the documentation, NEOM’s worker deaths were a category — a statistical possibility acknowledged by no one, disputed by the Saudi government, and tracked only by embassy mortality data that lacked the granularity to assign deaths to specific projects. After the documentation, Abdul Wali’s death became a case — a specific individual, at a specific site, on a specific date, employed through a specific chain of contractors, killed by a specific mechanism, with a specific family pursuing specific accountability from specific entities that refused to provide it.
The transition from category to case is the transition that the system is designed to prevent. Categories can be managed. Cases create obligations. A government can respond to a statistic with a counter-statistic. It cannot respond to a named individual, a documented cause of death, and a family member with British citizenship and access to international media with the same administrative dismissal.
Abdul Wali Skandar Khan was 25. He had two children. He was a civil engineer — not an unskilled labourer but a qualified professional. He went to Saudi Arabia to work on a healthcare centre — a hospital, the most humane of construction projects. He was killed by a falling gate. No one investigated. No one was held responsible. His brother flew across continents to retrieve his body. His family cannot access the compensation that was deposited without their consent.
He is the first name on a list that NEOM does not publish, in a record that the Saudi government does not maintain, for a project that the Public Investment Fund has since substantially suspended. The healthcare centre where he was working may be completed. The city it was supposed to serve may not be. But the gate that fell on a 25-year-old engineer on 28 December 2023 fell with a finality that no project revision, no budget adjustment, and no strategic pivot can undo.
His children will grow up without him. They will learn, eventually, that their father died building a hospital in a city that was never built, and that no one was held accountable — not the subcontractor, not the contractor, not the developer, and not the fund that owned them all. They will learn that the system worked exactly as designed: the gate fell, the man died, the file was closed, and the construction continued.
This investigation draws on documentation by ALQST (November 2024 briefing paper on NEOM worker deaths; identification of first documented death); FairSquare (“Underlying Causes,” May 2025, documenting Badri Bhujel’s death); testimony from Meer Wali Khan; Middle East Eye (original reporting on Abdul Wali’s death); Dezeen (reporting on ALQST’s documentation); and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.