RIYADH, 19 November 2004 — Immigration officials denied entry to 53 Bangladeshis using forged visas this week upon arrival at Jeddah airport in what may be a job seeking scheme.
The Bangladeshis supposedly arrived in Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah. Police said they all were from the Bangladeshi town of Cox’s Bazar and flew to Yemen on Nov. 7 from Dhaka with forged Umrah visas. After a four-day stay in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, they flew to King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah. Discovering the false documents upon arrival, airport immigration officers became suspicious and seized their passports. They then were sent back to Bangladesh after deportation processing.
“We don’t have any information about the deportation of our nationals from Jeddah,” said the country’s Ambassador-designate S.M. Ikramul Haque when asked about the case. But the story was widely reported in Bangladeshi newspapers. The Daily Star, a Bangladeshi English newspaper, said in its report that 45 of the 53 people deported from Jeddah were arrested on arrival at Dhaka’s Zia International Airport.
“They were detained because they could not show their passports,” the report said, adding they were later released after Bangladeshi police produced them before a court.
Bangladeshis authorities have ordered an investigation into the forgery ring, it said.
More than a million Bangladeshi nationals currently reside and work in Saudi Arabia, but community leaders say such incidents are very rare. “In this case, most of them are said to be Rohingya refugees, as they speak in Rohingya dialect,” said Ariful Islam, a Bangladeshi worker.
The group has a distinct culture with roots to Arab, Pathan, Bengali and Indo-Mongoloid people. Arakan, formerly called Rohang, lies in the northwestern part of Burma and shares a 167-mile land-sea border with Bangladesh.
Instances of pilgrims arriving on forged visas have been reported on several occasions in the past. In 2002, Saudi authorities gave permission to 28 Egyptian pilgrims who arrived at Prince Muhammad Airport in Madinah on forged visas to enter the Kingdom and proceed on their Haj pilgrimage. They were issued with valid pilgrim visas as a humanitarian gesture after it became clear that they were duped by unscrupulous travel agents.
