Kathmandu, Aug 24 (IANS) Fifteen Nepali workers were freed from an Iraq jail after serving three months behind bars, apparently because of a misdemeanour by their employer, a Kuwait company, Nepal's official media said Thursday.
The men, hired by the KGL Company in Kuwait, were arrested by the Iraqi authorities around May for transporting food grain past the expiry date, and jailed.
They were released this week and the news reached Nepal after one of them, Suman Lama, called up his wife Tuesday.
Though the government of Nepal has barred its citizens to work in Iraq, Nepalis continue to go to the oil-rich country either lured by the bait of high wages or duped by recruitment agencies.
Lama and the 14 others were hired last September by a Nepali agency that told them they would be taken to Kuwait. However, once they reached Kuwait, they were pressured to go to Iraq and threatened that their wages would be withheld if they refused.
Nepal's state media Thursday said 40 Nepali workers had returned to the Himalayan state in the last three weeks after being similarly duped.
The recruitment agencies had offered them jobs in Kuwait but tried to send them to Iraq, the Rising Nepal daily said.
One of the 15 jailed workers had sent a frantic letter to a friend in Kuwait from prison, saying they were in a "desperate situation" and asking him to raise money for his release.
Every year, tens of thousands of Nepali men and women go overseas looking for employment. Nepal is one of the poorest nations in the world, with unemployment and the security situation worsening due to a decade-old communist insurgency, political instability and corruption.
The migrant workers pay recruitment agencies large sums of money for jobs abroad and often end up selling land or taking loans at high interest rates to raise the money.
Once they have paid, they are often left in the lurch by the unscrupulous agencies that either decamp with their travel documents or send them to banned and dangerous destinations illegally.
Workers returning from abroad frequently complain of long working hours, abuse by employers and non-payment of salaries.
Authorities here have been turning a blind eye to the illegal activities of the recruitment agencies that are often run by "well connected people".
On Wednesday, a politician with royal "connection" was handed over to the police by Maoist guerrillas on the allegation that five years ago, he had taken money from three people for offering them jobs in Japan.