Belal Hossain Biplob

More than two lakh undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in Malaysia are set to be regularised, with the legalisation procedure expected to begin next week. The process will go on simultaneously with the recently-agreed recruitment of 1.5 million fresh Bangladeshi workers, said sources in Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.

Around 300,000 new jobs will be created in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in next four years ahead of the World Expo 2020 that is scheduled to be held in Dubai.

Around 3 lakh registered Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia would have to pay the levy previously paid by their employers as the country yesterday imposed a new levy on foreign workers.

Afzal Hossain of Noakhali had gone to Saudi Arabia for job, spending Tk 6 lakh.

A sum of Tk 50 crore does not seem to be any money at all to the people at the home and foreign ministries. The amount, which should have been in the government coffer, now lies with a foreign company.

In the wake of a series of controversies, the Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur now says Malaysia's appointing a company would establish its absolute control over labour recruitment from Bangladesh.

"Less than an hour after the voting began, some seven to eight ruling party men stormed the booth I was assigned to. Identifying themselves as Chhatra League and Jubo League activists, they tried to take the ballots away from me."

IN 2015, we witnessed the ghastly experiences of thousands of Bangladeshi migrants, rescued from the death traps set by the human traffickers...

Some polling centres in Savar municipality recorded an abnormally high turnout yesterday although the presence of voters was visibly thin.

Bangladeshi migrant workers often don't get expected services from the labour wings of the country's foreign missions despite the fact that they send home remittance of around $14 billion a year. In most cases, officials and staffs at the wings are unresponsive to the needs of the workers abroad, a number of migrant workers and rights activists told The Daily Star yesterday.

Law enforcers have so far failed to arrest any of the masterminds behind the trafficking of over 3,000 Bangladeshis through the Bay of Bengal this year. They have been carrying out drives to track down human traffickers and their ring leaders since the trafficking victims were rescued mostly from Thailand and Malaysia in May and June. In the last six months, law enforcers could only arrest around 400 alleged middlemen and local agents of human-trafficking networks, not any of the ring leaders.

Even though two probe bodies found four officials of DIP guilty of issuing over 100 government-employee passports based on fake certificates, a section of home ministry officials are now trying to save one of them from punishment.

Though the International Civil Aviation Organisation's deadline for terminating the use of handwritten passports

They paid fees and service charges to IRIS Corporation for their passports in Saudi Arabia three to four months ago but the Malaysian outsourcing company did not bother to give passports to at least 50,000 Bangladeshi expatriates.

More Bangladeshi workers went abroad in the first 10 months of this year than the entire last year, government data show.

The Saudi Arabian government is allegedly putting pressure on Bangladeshi recruiting agencies to send female workers to the kingdom, although women are reluctant to go there for fear of torture by employers.

Around one lakh Bangladeshis go to Saudi Arabia every year to perform hajj and pay private agencies a good amount for better services during the holy ritual.

The scene of the stampede that left hundreds of Hajj pilgrims dead in Saudi Arabia still haunts Shamim Ahmed, 45.

Ferdous Ahmed was waiting in a queue on the third floor of Jamaraat Bridge in Mina to join the symbolic “Stoning of Satan” ritual.

Ismail looked up at the sky and took a deep breath.