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Kathmandu, Sept 26: Around 200 Myanmar nationals, mostly Rohingya refugees, reached Saudi Arabia on Nepali passports, a foreign ministry probe has found. Officials suspect an organized racket helped them acquire citizenship papers and passports illegally before leaving the country.

The Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, fled to Bangladesh after repeated military crackdowns. Investigators believe traffickers brought some through India into Nepal, where they managed to get documents and travel abroad.

Most entered Saudi Arabia before December 2015, when handwritten Nepali passports were phased out. Many had obtained them before 2010, when machine-readable passports were introduced. Authorities say some passports had photo swaps while others were issued with fake citizenship certificates, indicating collusion of officials from district administration, immigration, and airport offices.

Saudi immigration detained many of them during a crackdown on visa overstayers and alerted the Nepali embassy in Riyadh. Embassy officials confirmed they were not Nepali citizens and refused to issue travel documents, but Saudi authorities continue to pressure Nepal to repatriate them.

The foreign ministry is collecting copies of the passports from Riyadh to trace their issuance and identify those involved. Officials say handwritten passports were highly vulnerable to forgery, which is why their misuse was widespread before Nepal switched to machine-readable passports and later to e-passports.

In 2012, immigration authorities arrested nearly 500 people at Tribhuvan International Airport for passport misuse, mostly Indians and Bangladeshis. Myanmar nationals were not caught then, though officials say many had already left using Nepali passports.

The issue had surfaced as early as 2015, and there were talks of involving UNHCR, but no concrete steps were taken. The matter has now reemerged under Saudi pressure to resolve the legal status of those detained.

Nepal remains one of the largest labor-sending countries to Saudi Arabia. More than 150,000 Nepalis traveled there for work in the last fiscal year alone, according to official data, making the passport misuse case a matter of diplomatic and security concern.

People’s News Monitoring Service