NCRI – On Saturday morning, August 12, 2017, a Qom (Southwest of Tehran) municipality contractor, who, after months of trying was unable to recover his unpaid fees, self-immolated himself in front of the municipality and died Saturday night due to his burns.
Fereidoun Abedini, head of the Isfahan Burn Center, said on Monday, August 14, told the Fars government news agency that the individual (Sheikh Alizadeh) had died on Sunday evening, while the percentage of his burns was over 90 percent.
Hamid Reza Abedi, Director General of Public and International Affairs of the Municipality of Qom, said hours after his attempted self-immolation that the life of this contractor was not at risk.
Abedi had claimed that “the percentage of burns [Sheikh Alizadeh] is not too acute and there is no particular issue for him.”
Reza Rahimi, the mayor of District 2 of Qom, also said in response to this self-immolation: “The debts to the contractor who committed suicide on Saturday were a matter of past and have been fined in accordance with the general terms of the treaty.”
The local “19 Day” newspaper in Qom also published a report on the dispute between contractors and the municipality of Qom following the incident, and wrote in an article that “the fire of desperation rages over the contractors of the municipality of Qom.”
The newspaper quoted Mehdi Simorgh, CEO of the Ganjineh sazan Simorgh Company, which is a contractor of the Qom municipality, as saying that the municipality has not paid his claims since 2014.
The contractor added that “my owed money has not been paid … my insurance has not been paid … my bank accounts are closed and my machinery has been stopped”.
The newspaper “19 Day” wrote that this person “is owed more than one billion tomans from the Qom municipality and knows people who are owed seven billion tomans and more.”
Ali Taqawi, another contractor of the Qom municipality, said in an interview with the newspaper that his demands in 2015 and 2016 remained unpaid.
He added that “the reputation of all contractors in Qom has gone. All of the old contractors have gone to other cities, and we are left behind because of the old owed money. We do not even have the right to protest …”
Another creditor and contractor from Qom municipality, Mehdi Darabi, said to “19 Day”: “The municipality has terminated his contract for no reason only because he has objected to his payment delay”.
