Four Nepali women migrant wokers are languishing inside a prison in Saudi Arabia on the charge of giving birth illegally.

Nepali Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Udayaraj Pandey said the women, aged 25-35, were sent to the prison with their babies after they failed to identify the fathers of the babies when the hospital where they gave birth asked for details.

The women landed in the country as housemaids. Pandey said two of them are serving jail terms for the past two years and the other two for the past eight months.

Languishing in Jeddah and Riyadh-based prisons, the women have been claiming that their children's fathers are from Bangladesh and India. The Saudi Arabian government has been urging the embassy to repatriate the women along with their children to Nepal but the women and their children have been denied travel documents due to their failure to identify their children's fathers, Pandey said.

"The Home Ministry has recently decided to grant travel documents on humanitarian grounds," Pandey said, adding that the process to send them back home has been initiated

Published on: 9 May 2014 | Kantipur