A father of three died when he fell off the fifth floor of the Skyparks construction site near the airport in Gudja yesterday morning.

Louis Cutajar, 44, from Birżebbuġa fell when a crane was lifting metal sheets onto the balcony of the fifth floor.

Family friends described Mr Cutajar as a “hard-worker” and a “family man”.

Leonard Perkins, a health and safety engineer based in the UK, said that in recent days he saw workers not wearing safety harnesses doing maintenance work on the Skyparks site.

Investigations into yesterday’s fatality are continuing and the circumstances have still to be established.

The Occupational Health and Safety Authority said in a statement that “without entering into the merits of this accident”, all work had to be subjected to a risk assessment.

It added that those responsible for construction sites had to make sure that control measures, including the required safety systems, were planned carefully and implemented in full.

A spokesman for Malta International Airport said that in view of the ongoing investigations by the relevant authorities it had no comments to make. It expressed condolences to the relatives and friends of the victim.

This was the second fatality on a construction site this month. Just three weeks ago, 59-year old Żaren Baldacchino, who was visiting his son on a Sliema construction site, died when the steel wire of a tower crane snapped and its metal hook fell on him.

The victim was not involved in the construction work.