12 girls destined (trafficked to Saudi Arabia) to work as housemaids were intercepted at Entebbe International Airport by the Immigration officers and Aviation Police earlier on Tuesday 8 October 2019.
Police says these 12 young girls were being trafficked to Saudi Arabia but fortunately, security at the Airport got to know about it before these girls boarded the plane.
The girls who were dressed in white T-shirts, bearing Arabic writings uniform claiming to be an authorised company which was false, informed Police that Awali Umaru and another person only identified as Yasin based at Freedom City along Entebbe road recruited them.
Patrick Onyango, Kampala Metropolitan Police spokesperson said that they are now in search of the persons who recruited the girls. Meanwhile, he says the girls are held at Entebbe Police Station as investigation proceeds.
Onyango adds that the girls had one-way ticket aboard the Fly Emirates, and now Police has opened up a file, to investigate issues surrounding these girls’ illegal enrolment.
“The youth were wearing T-shirts with Arabic writings and when we cross-checked, we found that the company that recruited them is not among the list of authorised recruitment agencies. All the youth had a one-way ticket aboard the Fly Emirates,” Onyango stated.
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Additionally, Onyango called upon the relatives of these girls or any other person who knows any of the girls, to feed Police with the information to help them in their further investigation in this matter.
Earlier on, in a media briefing during the Prevention of Trafficking person workshop held in Kampala, the Executive Director Uganda Association of External Recruitment Agency (UAERA), an umbrella organisation for registered export labour companies, Enid Nambuya said that Ugandans are responsible for their suffering in the Arab World.
Nambuya says Ugandans use false documents to get to these Middle East countries for work and when they face torture, harassment and exploitation, they find no one to rescue them.
“Because of frustration at home, women welcome any form of work available abroad, but they are not proud of it. They, therefore, use falsified documents, so their people back home don’t know the kind of jobs they are going to do in the Middle East. They want to appear as though they are doing the best jobs in the world, but if problems come, it’s difficult to help them,” Nambuya said.
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Many Ugandans have flown to the Middle East countries in search for employment opportunities and many have ended up being victims of torture, exploitation and many have lost lives in the process.
