A Bristol landlord has denied allegations that he left a family of nine in a house with no heating or hot water and a broken cooker for weeks during winter.
Fadumo Omar lives with her seven children and her mother in a house in St Werburghs, and says that her landlord failed to help her when her boiler and cooker broke in mid-December of 2021, which she said left her feeling "sad".
"It is hard, and cold. All this damage in my home is very rubbish," she said.
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But her landlord, Ejaz Ahmed, has denied the allegations and says that he has done everything he can to help her.
'I've done what I think is reasonable'
Fadumo told Bristol Live that three weeks after her maintenance problems started on December 17, Mr Ahmed had failed to fix them, despite several requests for help.
However, Mr Ahmed said he did everything he could to help, and that any problems he had were created by difficulties in getting engineers to work over the Christmas period.
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Mr Ahmed says that when the boiler broke on the December 17, he arranged for an engineer to go to the house the day after to fix it, but the tenants did not answer the door.
He says that the engineer then went back five days later to to fix it and was able to assess the boiler, but he was unable to fix it and told Ejaz that it needed to be replaced.
Ejaz says that he went to Fadumo's house personally that day with four electric heaters.
He also claims that he offered to give her a water heater to go under her sink so that she would have hot water, but that she refused this and was "adamant she wanted the central heating working and her boiler working".
Mr Ahmed says he was unable to find a new boiler until December 28, and could not get an engineer to fit it until the new year.
He says that he eventually found an engineer to fit the boiler on January 6, but by January 10 the new boiler had stopped working.
Fadumo also says that the cooker in her house was broken for weeks over winter, and there were broken windows in the house and mould on some of the walls.
Mr Ahmed denies that Fadumo was unable to cook for her family, and says she had a working oven, and a hob on which only one gas ring out of four was broken.
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He says that he is not aware of any mould but if it exists then it may be caused by Fadumo's laundry.
And he said that he has been into the house to look at the windows, but he was unable to get into the room in question because someone was asleep in there.
"I've done what I think is reasonable. As a tenant you have a responsibility to keep the house clean and in good working order," he said.
Protests outside Ejaz's workplace
On January 10, when her boiler broke down, Fadumo arranged a meeting with community union Acorn, where she spoke to them about her problems.
Acorn member Rose Whitehorn said that at this meeting, Fadumo was "very distressed at not being able to shower properly, not being able to cook properly for her kids."
On the same day, Acorn organised a protest outside Ejaz's workplace in Lawrence Hill, after which he sent an engineer to fix Fadumo's boiler.
But Mr Ahmed said he was not aware the boiler had stopped working again because she did not tell him.
"Had she phoned me I would have arranged for the engineer to go back," he said.
Two days later, about 20 Acorn protesters arrived at his place of employment again to ask him to fix the cooker and the windows, and to give Fadumo £1250 - one month's rent - in compensation.
Rose said that they were there to get Fadumo "full justice and compensation for the experience that she's been put through."
Ejaz says that all the problems in the house have now been fixed, but he denies the maintenance issues were resolved because of Acorn.
And he says he has agreed to give Fadumo compensation "just to get them off my case".
"What Acorn have done, OK, it's caused me stress. That's fine, I can live with that.
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"I didn't do it because they put that pressure on. This was going to be done anyway," he said.
And he robustly denies that he has not been helpful to Fadumo, who has been his tenant since 2018.
He said that if the problems in the house had not happened in the Christmas period, he would have solved them much more quickly.
Mr Ahmed said: "It was just the timing of it. Had it been any other time, it would not have dragged on for three weeks.
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"If you look at it, during this time, I gave them heating. Unfortunately I couldn't give them hot water, my hands were tied.
"There's limited things I can do given that period of time. Had it happened any other time, it would have been totally different."
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