It was a small piece of news published on June 6, hardly noticeable in the slew of coronavirus coverage — 219 migrant workers deported from Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have been sent to jail on charges of “tarnishing the image of Bangladesh”.
The expatriates, who were in different prisons in the Middle East, landed in Bangladeshi jail straight from the quarantine centre in Turag where they were being kept in isolation following their deportation.
Police said they were jailed under Section 54 of the Code of Criminal Procedure because they are “all criminals”, but the law enforcers don’t yet know what crime was committed by them.
“They had gone abroad to work but got involved in different criminal activities instead. We don’t know yet what the crimes are, but we have sent ‘inquiry slips’ to the police stations of the villages they came from to probe on our behalf,” said Inspector Md Shafiullah, the investigation officer.
Meanwhile, a court rejected bail petitions of 38 of those who sought to be released, and on July 12, it instructed the police to submit a probe report in 10 days.
Md Anisuzzaman, counselor (political) and head of chancery at the Bangladesh embassy in Kuwait, stated that all the inmates sent back to Bangladesh from the Gulf country had received a state pardon from its Emir. They were all in for drug charges and mostly convicted for between five and 10 years.
Mohammad Rabiul Islam, counselor (labour) at the Bangladesh embassy in Qatar, also said, “Ninety of the imprisoned inmates sent back had been given royal pardons by the Emir because they had served two-thirds of their sentences. They were in jail on narcotics charges, while one or two were in on murder charges.”
Criminal records of the inmates sent from Bahrain also show the same — a mix of undocumented workers, people arrested for possessing alcohol and misusing telecom services. People with graver narcotics charges are scarce in the list.
Twenty-five-year-old Mohammad Shahin Alam is one of those who had been in prison in Bahrain because he was undocumented, and is now in jail for “tarnishing the image of the country”.
His father could not fathom why his son was sent to jail.
“Last month, we got to know that Shahin has come back to the country. He said he will have to stay in quarantine for two weeks, and then he will come back home. His mother and I were waiting for him to come home when we suddenly got a phone call … He told us he is in Kashimpur jail,” said Shahin’s father, who lives in Chandpur’s Matlab.
Shahin had gone to Bahrain four years ago to work as a pipefitter. A few weeks before he was deported, he called his family and told them his visa had expired and that he became undocumented.
“He informed us that for the past two months he had been doing menial labour. I advised him to immediately get his visa renewed and not to remain undocumented. He had gone to the relevant office to get his visa renewed when he was arrested,” described the father.
Neither the father nor the son knew that visas need to be renewed, before they expire, not after. Shahin was then sent to an immigrant detention centre.
His subsequent arrest upon arrival to Bangladesh is a double blow for his father, who himself recently lost his job at a jute mill in Narsingdi, when the government decided to shut down all public jute mills.
“I worked for 27 years at the mill, but was sent back home empty-handed. Now my son is deported and in jail. I have a Tk 4 lakh loan that I had taken out to send him abroad. What will we do now? How will we survive?” asked the father.
Mohammad Rasel was a rickshaw-puller in Chaiyakot village of Cumilla’s Chandina, when he took a gamble, and left for Bahrain five years ago, to work as a construction worker. His criminal records show that he became undocumented after failing to renew his residence permit.
“He was arrested by the authorities two months before he was sent to Bangladesh. Before that, he used to send me Tk 10,000 per month or a little more sometimes. We had borrowed Tk 3 lakh from a moneylender to send him abroad. Of the money he sent, Tk 4,000 used to go into payment for the loan. I have nothing, no savings. How will I feed my two children, and his old parents, if he is in jail?” asked his wife Minuara.
Forty-year-old Saiful Kamal Uddin was arrested in Bahrain for working without a permit, and is now languishing in jail for that “crime”. His nephew claimed that Saiful had become undocumented because the employer did not renew his uncle’s visa.
“He had gone to Bahrain four years ago to work as a welder. We didn’t even know he had become undocumented, until his mother died this year. He told us he couldn’t come back home for the funeral because his employer did not renew his visa,” claimed the nephew.
Saiful used to send back Tk 30,000 every month, and has two children, both below five. With their father in jail, the children now face a future full of uncertainty.
