Thousands of Tigrayans are being exiled from Saudi Arabia and are in secret imprisonment in Ethiopia: Reports

According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of Tigrayans are being exiled from Saudi Arabia and kept in secret imprisonment in Ethiopia. Officials from Ethiopia forcibly vanished thousands of ethnics.

According to the news reports of the international rights organisation, identified two detention sites where they put and mistreated thousands of people from the war-torn.

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They found this all locations with the use of satellites images, videos, and witness accounts; in Semera and Shone’s towns, they used these satellites to do the detention of Tigrayan deportees, HRW said.

According to the reports, returnees claim that they get abused and beaten in Saudi Arabia custody.

According to one migrant, Nadia Hardman, “we had faced horrific abuse when we were in Saudi custody. They locked us in detention while returning from Ethiopia.”

“Saudi Arabia should offer us protection to Tigrayans at risk, while Ethiopia should release all arbitrarily detained deportees, he added.”

Thousands of Ethiopians, mainly from the Tigray and Amhara regions, make illicit travel every year to Saudi Arabia via Yemen to get themselves a better life. But officials of Saudi Arabia expelled thousands of them in current years.

According to one migrant woman, who was deported from Saudi Arabia in the last year of December 2020, while coming back, federal police stopped her at a security checkpoint at Awash Sebat in Ethiopia’s Afar region in the previous year of April.

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They sent her to the “military camp”, where she stayed with other 700 Tigrayan deportees. After two days, they took her to Shone, located in the southern part of the country.

“When we asked the police for food and water and the toilet, but they have beaten us if we tried to leave our seats,” she told.

During Ethiopia’s war, thousands of people were killed, and millions were displaced from their native place.

The Ethiopian government made some restrictions for journalists that nobody would report any news related to war, and the government banned many journalists and freelancers.