The Kotoka International Airport (KIA) Regional Command of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) within a week has received a total of twenty-two deportees from Saudi Arabia on board Ethiopian Airlines Flight.

The deportees, comprising a male and 21 females and aged between 21-38 years were working as domestic help and a driver, but were deported for staying illegally.

They arrived with Travel Certificates issued by Ghana’s Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

Assistant Commissioner of Immigration (ACI) Barbara Sam, Public Relations Officer, GIS-KIA told the GNA that, the deportees, who are mostly Primary School, Junior High School and Senior High School leavers, were in Saudi Arabia since 2015 and 2017.

She said according to them, they were detained at a Deportation Centre in Saudi Arabia close to four months before their onward deportation to Ghana.

Regional distribution of the Deportees are; one each from Oti, Volta, Bono, Western, Central and Upper East, six each from the Greater Accra and the Northern, and four from the Ashanti Region.

"Narrating their ordeal in an interview, some of the ladies said their passports were seized by their hosts upon arrival claiming they owned it because they paid for it, and sometimes they were made to overwork 24 hours", she said.

ACI Sam said the deportees said they sometimes accused them wrongly for a crime they did not commit, while some were assaulted, abused sexually and fed once a day with bread, resulting in some complaints of severe stomach pains.

One of the ladies, aged 25 also narrating her ordeal amidst tears said, she had to escape whilst her host was out of town to seek refuge at Ghana’s Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

She advised the youth to stay in the country and work and not to be overly interested in traveling, particularly to the Gulf States, because some don’t even live to tell their stories.

She also advised the public to beware of "connection men, who would lure them into the “seeming juicy deals”, mentioning huge sums of monies as the monthly pay, which is not the true case when they get there."