DHAKA: As many as six hundred workers were deported from Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. The workers returned home after passing through what they called horrifying experiences in the Saudi deportation camps.

It is the highest number of deportees in a day from Saudi Arabia. An official in the immigration section of the airport told reporters that around 3,000 workers had been deported during the past one month as they had failed to show any work permits to Saudi authorities concerned.

The workers, many of whom had sold all their assets to manage money to go there and get jobs, said hundreds of more Bangladeshi workers were languishing in different Saudi jails and waiting to be deported.

Some of the deportees alleged that they were detained and sent back despite having valid documents (Akama), and accused both Saudi and Bangladeshi authorities of being responsible for their plight.

“We had nobody to help us. The government, the embassy and the manpower agents are all thieves,” said Muzammel Hossain. He used to work as a driver for a family in Al Turabi of Tayef. Many workers complained non-payment or under-payment of salaries and alleged that their employers threatened them with handing over to police whenever they demanded a raise in their salaries.

While telling their stories to reporters, a number of traumatised and helpless deportees could not hold back their tears and repeatedly said they did not know how they would face their poor family members who had spent their all savings for sending them abroad.

Talking about deportation centres and atrocities they suffered at the hands of Saudi policemen, they said: “We were almost starved to death and kept in inhuman conditions in the jail for about 15 days,” Hirok, one of the deportees, told the media men.

Other workers said each of them paid around Tk 1.5 lakh to middlemen, travel and recruiting agents for the job in Saudi Arabia. The secretary of the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment, AKM Shamsuddin, termed all returnees ‘illegal workers’ and denied all allegations levelled by the deported workers.

He said either they had overstayed or changed their company without permission or had gone there with Omra visa.

“The government will take adequate steps if the returnees can produce ‘documentary evidence’ to prove their allegations,” the official said.