JEDDAH, 5 March 2006 — Passport officers raided a number of houses in the districts of Al-Bawadi and Al-Naeem in Jeddah early yesterday morning.
According to local officials, 153 men and women overstayers of African and Asian origin were detained.
Officials transferred 12 of the detained suspects to King Saud Hospital to be checked for HIV.
Officers arrested 38 women and six men in one house for either being in the country illegally or sheltering undocumented migrants. Some of the women arrested in the raid are being charged with prostitution, said an official from the regional office of the Directorate General of Passports, the agency in charge of immigration and chasing down overstayers.
“We raided a few suspected whorehouses,” an official who did not want to be named told Arab News.
An unspecified number of alcohol-manufacturing operations were also shut down. An officer told Arab News that one dealer, who had a forged iqama, rushed to the bathroom to flush down his homemade alcohol, “but the man had too large a quantity to finish in time.”
A number of forged immigration documents and forging equipment were also confiscated during the operation.
Passport officials said that a number of HIV cases have been detected in past raids and therefore they routinely take suspects in for HIV screening.
According to the Ministry of Health, there are 10,924 reported cases of HIV — 2,005 of them Saudi and the rest foreigners. The ratio of reported cases of HIV in the Kingdom is one man to every three women.
Thousands of foreigners, mainly overstayers, have been rounded up and deported in an ongoing crime swoop that began across the Kingdom last year.
